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STUDY FOR HEAD OF CHRIST 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 





It is through this charming sketch that we know the former 
beauty of the now much faded “Last Supper’’ of Leonardo 
da Vinci, at Santa Maria delle Grazia, Milan. 








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er eAT PAINTERS 
% AND THEIR FAMOUS #¥€ 


BeolLeE PICTURES 


The Bible Story Retold in 
One Hundred Masterpieces 
Chronologically Arranged, 
With Sidelights on the Life 
and Work of the Artists 


EDITED BY 
WILLIAM GRIFFITH 


Former Editor of Current Opinion 


REPRODUCED IN AQUATONE 
AND PUBLISHED MDCCCCXXV BY 
WM. H. WISE & CO., NEW YORK 





4 F ta 


Copyright, 1925 a ah ‘ 
Wm. H. Wise & Co. _ 
| B y 


Printed in the U.S.A. 


INTRODUCTION 


T is interesting to note in a brief survey of the art of painting, as we know 
it today, that its beginnings were not only inspired by the Christian religion, 
but that its modern aspect may be attributed to the influence of one 
man, now known as St. Francis of Assisi, who lived in the thirteenth cen- 

tury. Anticipating the Renaissance, the founder of the Order of Franciscans con- 
ceived a religion of love instead of that of stern orthodox authority, and brought 
divinity not only nearer to man but to all creation. The birds and fishes were 
his little brothers and sisters, and, like the Psalmist of old, he called on the hills and 
valleys, the forests and the rivers, to join him in praising God. 

@ Although fresco painting had been known since antique times, the great possibilities for 
its use were not realized until the new outlook in life had awakened the Italian genius. 
The overpowering influence of St. Francis with its direct relationship between his 
preaching and nature was responsible for a revival of the arts, and a new style was 
required by the newera. Just as mosaic is the typical medium of the severe Byzantine 
art, and stained glass of the French of the thirteenth century, so did fresco become 
the process by which the Italians in the Gothic and early Renaissance periods expressed 
the new scenes from the life of St. Francis and all the gospel stories now viewed in 
the light of human emotion. 

@ During the Dark Ages, painting, as a secular art, almost entirely disappeared, and 
in the early days of the Church the Fathers gave little encouragement toart. ‘‘Cursed 
be all who paint pictures’’ is a sentiment not infrequently found in their writings. 
An important event in the early history of art occurred in the year 691 when the 
Council of Constantinople, formerly Byzantium, the capital of the Eastern Empire, 
decreed that “‘henceforth Christ was to be publicly exhibited in the figure of a man, 
not of alamb.’’ It marked the evaporation of all trace of the old reserve which Chris- 
tians had felt in figuring the person of Christ; and, at the same time, it indicated as 
fit themes for art those sufferings in the flesh, from the representations of which the 
Christians of the earlier centuries had shrunk as from a profanation. 

@ Apropos of the first depictions of Jesus, it is not known that there was ever any 
original portrait or likeness of Him in existence. As Pére Didon, the French Biblical 
scholar, observes, ‘‘Whatever may be written to the contrary, it is absolutely certain 
that the world and the Church have lost forever all vestige of trustworthy tradition 
concerning the aspect of Jesus on earth. There is not one syllable in the Gospels or 
in the epistles respecting the appearance of His form or face.’’ Nor is there any 
reference to it in the literature of the first two centuries, the earliest known reference 
being in. Justin Martyr, who says that when Jesus came to the Jordan, ‘‘He appeared 
_without beauty, as the Scriptures proclaimed.’”’ Clement of Alexandria says, ‘‘ Him- 
self also, the Head of the Church, passed through the world unlovely in the flesh, 
and without form, thereby teaching us to look at the Unseen and incorporate of the 
Divine Cause.”’ 


INTRODUCTION 


@ In view of such scholarly testimony, it is curious that the master painters have 
from the beginning depicted Christ as a divinely attractive, never as a repulsive, 
figure. His face, as imagined and portrayed by them, has variously expressed benig- 
nity, sympathy, understanding, sorrow, pity or love; but nowhere in art does the “‘Lord 
will to use a commonplace form of body’’. 
@ The first great master to break away from the fixed type of Byzantine art was the 
Florentine painter, Giovanni Cenni, commonly known as Cimabue. He was born 
in 1240 and died in 1302. In his work a great change is perceptible. “If in type 
his Madonna still adheres to the Byzantine tradition as regards features,’’ notes Sir 
William Orpen, in his Outline of Art, “‘a new softness has crept into her face, the 
infant Jesus is no longer wizened but tender and more childlike, while there is a touch 
of human kindness in the angels who bear them company.”’ Coincidentally, Cimabue 
was commissioned to decorate the church where the ashes of St. Francis rest, and 
he was assisted by his apprentice, the famous Giotto, whose work was directly inspired 
by ‘‘the little brother of the poor’’. 
@ It is in the early Renaissance period that we get just fifty years of perfect work— 
the time of such masters as Luini, Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, 
Mantegna, Verrocchio, Cima da Conegliano and—in date, though only in his earlier 
life belonging to the school—Raphael. The great difference between these artists 
and their immediate predecessors, as Ruskin points out, is “their desire to make every- 
thing dainty and delightful.’’ After them came ‘‘a phase of gigantic power and 
exquisite ease and felicity which possess an awe and charm of their own. They are 
more inimitable than were the workers of the perfect school; but they are not perfect.” 
@ The great artistic revolution produced by the Renaissance, inaugurated by Cimabue 
in Florence and Duccio in Siena, was given its greatest primary impetus by Giotto, 
whose first aim was “‘to infuse new life into traditional composition by substituting 
the heads, attitudes and draperies of the actual world for the spectral forms and con- 
ventional types of the Byzantine painters’’; and whose next was ‘‘to vindicate the right 
of modern Europe to think, feel and judge for itself, to reissue or recoin the precious 
gold of the past according as the image and superscription are or are not worthy of 
perusal.’”? He was one of the few great innovators whose genius forced itself into 
early recognition. Ruskin does ‘‘not know in the annals of art another such example 
of happy, practical, unerring and benevolent power.”’ 
@ Giotto set the example to his great successors of the Renaissance of using contempo- 
rary Florentines as models for his saints and apostles, and frequently of dressing them 
in thirteenth century costumes. In this regard we have to bear in mind that in those 
days portraiture pure and simple was seldom practised. Art was the handmaid of 
the Church, and painters devoted themselves very largely, if not exclusively, to sacred 
subjects; and if an artist wished to convey a compliment he did it through his picture. 
Thus, if a wealthy citizen wished to present an altar-piece to his church, the painter 
would include therein a portrait of him among the figures represented doing homage 
to the Virgin and the Child. The names of the donors of such works are for the most 
part forgotten—they would interest few after their generation had passed away— 
but the portrait may generally be identified. If among the kneeling or standing 
8 


INTRODUCTION 


figures in a group you remark one who, at some personal inconvenience, looks over 
his shoulder to face the spectator, it is safe to assume that it is the portrait of the 
person who commissioned the work. The face, moreover, has an individuality lacking 
in the rest. , 
@ Portraits of members of the great Florentine family of the Medici frequently occur 
in picture and fresco painted by artists of the fifteenth century, and always in a flatter- 
ing vein. A well known example occurs in Vasari’s picture of the two patron saints 
of that family, SS. Cosmo and Damian; these are likenesses of Cosimo the Elder, 
and of the first Duke of Tuscany, also a Cosimo. In Botticelli’s ‘“‘Spring’”’, familiar 
to everyone through repeated reproduction, the youth who stands on the extreme 
left is almost certainly a representation of the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, 
Giuliano de’ Medici, who was assassinated by the Pazzi conspirators. There is no 
room for question concerning the many avowed likenesses of Cosimo and his famous 
grandson, Lorenzo—portrait busts of them exist; and if only by reason of the former’s 
bull neck and the latter’s misshapen nose, either can be identified at a glance, whether 
he appear among the Wise Men of the East or in another Biblical character. Lorenzo 
the Magnificent was a liberal patron of the arts, and painters acknowledged his sup- 
port in a manner calculated to flatter. Even a Medici might be gratified to see him- 
self represented as one of the Magi! 
@ Art cannot be said to have gone astray in such works, though modern taste might 
disapprove of the portrayal of a ruler, however excellent, in the character of a saint. 
Where art did go astray was when it made the canvas its vehicle for personal vengeance. 
Several famous painters have left works of this description. One of the best known 
is by the Spanish master, El] Mudo. It is a “Martyrdom of St. James the Great’’; 
and in it the court chamberlain of King Philip II of Spain appears as an executioner: 
It is known that the painter and the chamberlain were enemies, but what particular 
offending procured for the latter this left-handed compliment history does not record. 
Probably the most venomous piece of portraiture in Christian art is a ‘‘Temptation 
of St. Anthony” which hangs in the church of St. Agostino at Siena. It is by Ribera, 
a Neapolitan painter of Spanish extraction who flourished in the seventeenth century. 
Naples in his time was under Spanish rule, and in the canvas Ribera adroitly depicts 
a contemporary Spanish Don as the Evil One. It is perhaps the only picture in exist- 
ence which represents the devil wearing spectacles. 
@ Anachronisms in dress were very usual in the works of the Renaissance period and 
later, artists giving Biblical characters the attire of their own time. Pictures of the 
early saints and martyrs in which the characters are represented in brightly-hued 
doublets and trunk hose are very common in Italy. One of the greatest pictures 
in the world—Titian’s ‘‘Presentation of the Virgin”, in the Academy at Venice— 
is thus treated. The principal figure, the Madonna, is portrayed as an Italian peasant 
girl in a simple blue gown such as was worn in the sixteenth century; the ancillary 
characters, richly dressed with many jewels, serve to set off the beautiful simplicity 
of the Virgin’s attire. 
@ It was no doubt at the instance of the Spanish Holy Office—the influence of Spain 
then being strong in Italy—that a purity campaign was undertaken against the artistic 
9 


INTRODUCTION 


productions of the former country. Italy, however, adopted methods less drastic— 
for which we may be grateful. She did not ordain the destruction of such works 
as were thought to offend; an example of her more lenient system of correction is 
furnished by Michel Angelo’s great fresco, ‘‘The Last Judgment’’, in the Sistine Chapel, 
which includes nude figures. It is of passing interest to note that Michel Angelo 
was the first great painter to introduce nude figures in his religious pictures. The 
custom had become so common in the latter part of the sixteenth century that Pope 
Paul IV commissioned a minor painter, Daniele of Volterra, to paint clothing on such 
figures in the Vatican and elsewhere as appeared to require it; which task earned for 
Daniele the nickname of I] Bragghetone—“‘the breeches-maker’’. 
@ There was a period when the fathers of painting were stricken with a craze for 
realism—rather dangerous when sacred subjects practically monopolised their easels. 
Realism may be legitimate in allegorical scenes, as when Giotto, adorning the Bardi 
Chapel with his frescos from the life of St. Francis, depicts ‘‘Poverty defending her- 
self with a stick from a dog.’”” Poverty had not before, and probably has not since, 
been presented in this posture. It was quite usual to introduce into scenes of ‘‘The 
Last Supper”’ a dog crouching under the table; or wandering about in expectation 
of scraps; and the presence of the dog does not offend. But in several such works 
a cat is introduced, and the result is curiously different. 
@ So far we have discussed mainly the development of Christian art in Italy, but 
that country had no monopoly of painting even in the Middle Ages. There were, - 
for instance, the Flemish masters of the mid-fourteenth century, Hubert and Jan 
Van Eyck, who are credited with having discovered oil as a medium for painting. 
Before their time artists had mixed their colors with water (frescos) or with yolk of 
egg (tempera paintings), and although modern authorities are inclined to question 
whether the Van Eycks were actually the first to make use of oil, they were certainly 
the pioneers of the new medium two centuries before Rembrandt and Rubens. 
@ Since their time religious paintings have been produced by natives of most of the 
great countries of Europe, but either because their work was not powerful enough to 
capture the popular imagination or, quite as probably, because they had no adequate 
historians and biographers, such as Vasari, to whom was delegated the task of 
perpetuating the fame of the Italian artists, the early artists of England, France 
and Germany never acquired the fame won by their brethren of Flanders and Italy. 
With few exceptions their names, and in many cases their works, have been entirely 
lost. 
@ Indeed, the lives of a majority of the master painters—and curiously and particu- 
larly of the great painters of religious subjects—have been tragic and precarious 
to a degree. With such rare exceptions as Veronese, Titian, Raphael, Rubens, 
Velasquez, Reynolds and the late John Singer Sargent, to mention some of those who 
are represented in this collection, there are few religious painters of genius who have 
not suffered a sort of crucifixion, either spiritually or materially. In many cases their 
misfortunes may be traced to their unruly artistic temperaments. In others they 
were the victims of the peculiar circumstances and conditions under which they were 
compelled to work. The early Italian painters, as well as those of Spain, were almost 
10 


INTRODUCTION 


solely dependent upon contemporary princes of the Church and State for patronage. 
Who but the Popes could have maintained such a succession of great artists as deco- 
rated the Vatican and St. Peter’s? The rich churches of Christendom inspired and 
financed the painting of nearly all the early masterpieces that are to be found in the 
great galleries today. And when a Holy Father, for one reason or another, withdrew 
his patronage from a painter, it left the artist poor indeed, unless he might find a royal 
or noble secular patron. Much the same condition affected the early French painters; 
notably Poussin and Le Brun, who were entirely dependent upon royal patronage 
and who rose in or fell from favor with pendulum-like regularity. Of the Dutch 
masters, what a contrast was the golden career of Rubens to the iron one of Rem- 
brandt; and in England what a difference between the material rewards meted out 
to the first president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and to his con- 
temporary, William Blake, who once recorded that he was born in London in 1757 
and had died several times since! 

@ Seeking a clew to the secret of great religious painting, one may find it, looking 
to the human aspect of the question, in the conception of the painter as primariiy a 
craftsman and a temperament. Once preeminently the Church was there to supply 
the theme and the occasion. The artist was there to make the most of both, accord- 
ing to his power of imagination and, transcendently, to his handicraftsmanship. “There 
is no such thing,” says Swinburne, ‘‘as an inarticulate poet.’’ Equally is it so that 
there is no such thing as a great painter who cannot paint—and paint superlatively 
well. Consider Raphael and his “‘Sistine Madonna’’. The picture survives as a triumph 
of religious exaltation and an interpretation of divine motherhood chiefly because 
it is magnificently and monumentally put together by a man who was so intensely 
a human being. 

@ It is a mistake to assume that “‘at some places in the morning of the modern world, 
in Italy, in Flanders or elsewhere, art sat at the feet of the Church and profited by a 
mystical laying on of hands. Even on that hypothesis it is to be noted that the re- 
ligious inspiration depends for its fortunes utterly upon the caprice of fate that illu- 
mines one man and not the other. In Spain there is something like religious ecstasy 
in the paintings of El Greco, whereas the religious compositions of Velasquez are 
not comparable to his secular masterpieces. . . . It all comes back to the generosity 
of nature, which may or may not project into the world a man with the genius of 
religious painting in him. A long time ago the earth was dowered with such masters. 
They and not their time account for what they did. Nor let it be forgotten that 
most of them were also great mural painters, great portrait painters, as much at home 
with a secular as with a sacred object—in other words, simply great masters of a craft.” 


W. G. 


ng 





a ae = ee 








SNA aN aNIENENTSS) 


“fg N presenting with each of the following 
pictures a biographical sketch of the 
Ni artist and a brief interpretation of 
the painting itself, we have aimed to 
make a complete and understandable unit of each 
subject. Our appreciation of a masterpiece is in- 
complete without a knowledge of its creator, his 
period, and the motive which inspired his work. 
And neither can we know the man without a speci- 
men of his work. 
The order of arrangement follows the Biblical 
chronology, but, for the student of art, reference 
to the chronological index of artists by schools 
will indicate the development of painting and the 
influence of each great painter on his successors. 
Under each illustration is given the date of the 
artist’s birth and death and the Bible text that is 
illustrated. Also our acknowledgment for the 
privilege of reproduction and the present location 
of the original painting. 





EDWARD BURNE-JONES 


Z=—3NTIL Edward Burne-Jones was 


S 4 twenty-three years old he never 
saw a good picture. It was in 

0 that year that he began to 

—I study the rudiments of draw- 

ing. Yet a year or two later no less an 
artist and critic than Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti declared that Burne-Jones’ de- 
signs were equal to Albrecht Diirer’s finest 


work; and today he is regarded as “per- 





to their joint efforts the complete revolu- 
tion which took place in decorative art, 
and drove Victorian stuffiness from our 
houses, is to be ascribed. 

It was for the Kelmscott Press, founded 
by Morris, that Burne-Jones made eighty- 
seven illustrations for an edition of Chau- 
cer, and for a long period he was a de- 
signer of mosaics and executed designs for 
tapestries. It is probable that his influence 


haps the most per- 
fect of English paint- 
ers.” 

As his name indicates, 
Burne-Jones was of 
Welsh descent. His 
mother died at his 
birth, and his only 
sister in early infancy. 
His father, a small 
tradesman who made 
picture-frames and 
sold stationery in Bir- 
mingham, England, 
was ambitious for his 
son to be a clergy- 
man, and managed 
to give him a superior 
education. At nine- 
teen the youth won 
a scholarship at Exe- 
ter College and went 
up to Oxford. There 


URNE-JONES’ “Days of Creation,” 

consisting of six panels, of which the 
jirst and last are reproduced here, was 
originally designed for a church window. 
Six angels are depicted, symbolizing the 
six days of creation. Each angel is 
crowned with a plume of fire, and each 
bears a crystal globe reflecting an act of 
creation, from the ordering of chaos in 
the first, where a light globe and a dark 
globe are taking definite shapes amid mys- 
terious light and darkness, to the newly 
created man and woman in the sixth. 
The graduating colors in these panels 
which give the key to the motive are most 
ingeniously manipulated. In the first it is 
that of a cold gray-green dawn, and the note 
is successively and felicitously changed 
to harmonize with the day portrayed. 


has been exercised far 
less in painting than 
in the broad fields of 
decorative design. He 
executed cartoons for 
stained glass, and 
windows from his de- 
signs are to be found 
throughout England 
and occasionally in 
America. In fact, his 
romantic imagination 
dominated every 
branch of his art, and 
his energy needed to 
be inexhaustible to 
keep pace with his 
constant procession of 
ideas. 

Burne-Jones was 
made an associate of 
the Royal Academy 
in 1883, and _ ac- 


he met another fresh- 

man of Welsh birth, William Morris, and 
the face of things suddenly changed. 
Their dreams and aspirations tallied in 
that their deep-rooted sense of the ugliness 
and monotony of the present and their 
common love of the past drew the young 
undergraduates together and laid the foun- 
dation of a life-long friendship. 

In 1856 we hear of Burne-Jones and 
Morris sharing lodgings in London, devot- 
ing themselves respectively to painting 
and poetry. Recognition came early to 
both of them, and six years later Burne- 
Jones painted his now famous little picture 
of “Christ and the Merciful Knight,” 
which ‘‘stamped its author at once as a 
master of original genius, whose style was 
entirely distinct from that of Rossetti, as 
well as absolutely unlike that of any con- 
temporary artist.”” He and Morris were 
for many years co-partners in the cele- 
brated firm of Morris and Company, and 


14 


knowledged the com- 
pliment by sending his oil-painting, “‘The 
Depths of the Sea,’”’ to the yearly exhibi- 
tion. In this. he pictured a mermaid 
carrying down with her a youth whom she 
has unconsciously drowned in the impetu- 
osity of her love. Its tragic irony of con- 
ception and beauty of execution give it a 
high place among his works, his own con- 
ception of which is stated in a letter to a 
friend: ‘‘I mean by a picture a beautiful 
romantic dream of something that never 
was, never will be—in a light better than 
any light that ever shone—in a land no 
one can define or remember, only desire.” 
No artist was ever truer to his own ideals, 
for his men and women, earth, sky, rocks 
and trees are not of this world, but make 
a world of their own consistent with itself, 
therefore having its own reality. 
He was engaged on his picture of “The 
Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon’ until a 
few hours before his death, on June 17, 1898. 


THE DAYS OF CREATION 
THE FIRST DAY i aS ‘THE SIXTH DAY 






ms me 


aS LEDS AEN ae 


SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES (1833-1898) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Genesis I, 1-5; 24-31 Coliection of Alexander Henderson, Esq. 


Michel Angelo 


= 


wyA0-DAY I, Michel Angelo, sculp- 
\y tor, began the painting of the 
| Chapel.’”’” Here we have his 
NN y own written statement, dated 
March 10, 1508. It was set 
down in despair by the great “sculptor 
who painted.’ A little less than a year 
later, when the work on the Sistine Chapel 
was well under way, he protested again: 
“This is not my profession. ...I am 
uselessly wasting my 
time.”’ 
Michel Angelo, recog- 
nized as the greatest 
sculptor of the world, 
had been recalled to 
Rome by Pope Julius 
II and commanded to 
decorate the ceiling of 
the Sistine Chapel. 
He pleaded that 
painting was not his 
trade and _ insisted 
that the task should 
be given to his young 
rival Raphael. Per- 
haps he was still 
smarting under the 
humiliation of having been thrust out of 
the Vatican by a servant only a few months 
before. But the Pope was adamant and 
Michel Angelo reluctantly went to work 
on the Chapel, learning the technique of 
painting as he labored. 
“Destiny so ruled,’”’ writes Sidney Colvin, 
“that the work thus thrust upon him re- 
mains his chief title to glory.” 
Michel Angelo was born in a small town 
outside of Florence. His nurse was the 
wife of a marble cutter. In later years the 
great artist jokingly remarked that his love 
of sculpture had been sucked from the 
breast of his foster-mother. 






with Adam. 


One of his first pieces of carving was a. 


“Sleeping Cupid.” It was carried to Rome 
and fraudulently sold to a Cardinal as an 
antique piece of Greek sculpture. When 
the Cardinal learned of the deception he 
was so delighted to know that a living Ital- 
ian could produce work that rivalled the 
early Greeks that he sent for the sculptor 
and bestowed his favor upon him. 

Michel Angelo began work on the Chapel 
with a corps of assistants, but soon he 
drove them away and painted out every- 
thing they had done. Not content with 


THE Creation of Man is only a detail of 

the vast composition, covering over 
10,000 square feet of surface, on the ceiling 
of the Sistine Chapel. It shows the colos- 
sal figure of God reaching across the abyss 
which must forever separate Him from 
mankind, and about to touch fingertips 


Our first parent is painted as a mag- 
nificent superman, but his expression is 
languid and his manner listless. 
not yet quickened him with the touch 
which endowed him and each of his descen- 
dants with the precious gift of a soul. 


16 


dispensing with their services he tore down 
the scaffoldings they had erected and put 
up his own. Then he locked the door and 
for four years toiled on in sorrow and fury. 
At last, on All Saints’ Day, 1512, he 
removed the scaffoldings from which the 
impatient Pope had threatened to have him 
thrown, and after lying on his back for 
four years to paint the ceiling, he stood on 
his feet once more to receive the greatest 
ovation ever tendered 
any artist. 

Raphael openly 
thanked God that it 
had been given to him 
to live in the same 
century with Michel 
Angelo. 

The great sculptor 
lived to be nearly 
ninety, working with 
undimmed vision and 
unflagging genius up 
to the very end. 

A friend met the great 
man one day near 
the Colosseum. He 
was on foot making 
his way through the snow, aged, infirm and 
alone. The friend inquired where he was 
going. ‘“To school,’’ he replied, ‘‘to school, 
to try to learn something.”’ 

From his earliest youth Michel Angelo 
cherished all worthy things, his art first, to 
which he gave himself completely in spite 
of his father’s opposition. Ordinary pleas- 
ures he held in contempt; he worked without 
ceasing and denied himself every luxury. 
“More than this,’’ Taine writes, “he lived 
like a monk, without wife or mistress, 
chaste in a voluptuous court, knowing but 
one love, and that austere and Platonic, 
for one woman as proud and as noble as 
himself. At evening, after the labor of the 
day, he wrote sonnets in her praise, and 
knelt in spirit before her, as did Dante at 
the feet of Beatrice, praying to her to 
sustain his weaknesses and keep him in the 
‘right path.” He bowed his soul before 
her as before an angel of virtue... . 
She died before him, and for a long time he 
remained ‘downstricken, as if deranged.’ 
Several years later his heart still cherished 
a great grief—the regret that he had not, 
at her deathbed, kissed her brow or cheek 
instead of her hand.” 


God has 


ae. 


THE CREATION OF MAN 





MICHEL ANGELO (1475-1564) 
Genesis I, 27 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Sistine Chapel, Rome 


WILLIAM BLAKE 


EING asked for his autograph 
# on one occasion, William Blake, 
the great English artist-poet, 
whom Wordsworth pronounced 
‘mad, but with something in 
his madness which interests me more than 
the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter 
Scott,’ signed this epitaph: ‘“‘Born 28th 
Nov. 1757, in London, and has died several 
times since.”’ To a mutual friend who 
offered to introduce 





insight, as a planet within its own orbit.” 
In later life Blake declared, “I am right; 
others who differ with me are wrong,” 
and it seems to have been his attitude 
from the beginning. 

At fourteen Blake was apprenticed to an 
engraver, and the engraving branch of art 
was that which he followed ever after- 
wards as his regular calling. He next 
studied in the Antique School of the Royal 


Blake to Wordsworth 
the former expressed 
his thanks strongly, 
saying, ‘““You do me 
honor. Mr. Words- 
worth is a great man. 
Besides, he may con- 
vince me that I am 
wrong about him. I 
have been wrong be- 
fore now.”’ Visiting 
England during the 
lifetime of both Blake 


DARING indeed is this conception of 

“The Creation of Eve,” a picture that 
might well have come to grief in lesser 
hands than Blake’s. As it is, the picture 
is a poetic conception of the scriptural 
text: “And the Lord God caused a deep 
sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; 
and He took one of his ribs, and closed up 
the flesh instead thereof. And therib... 
made He awoman....’’ The scene is the 
garden of Eden, symbolized by a grove 
in the background. In spite of the diffi- 


Academy, under a 
master named 
Mosher, who figures . 
in this anecdote: 


Young Blake was ex- 
amining some prints 
from Raphael and 
Michel Angelo in the 
Academy library 
when Mosher extolled 
in their stead the 
works of Rubens and 
Lebrun, [iese 
things that you call 


and Wordsworth, the 
German painter 
Gotzenberger has left 
on record: “I saw in 
England many men 
of talent, but only 
three men of genius—Coleridge, Flaxman 
and Blake; and of these Blake was the 
greatest.” 

Blake was most scantily educated in the 
rudiments of reading and writing; arith- 
metic also may be taken for granted, but 
it is not recorded. He himself was never 
a believer in formal education, contend- 
ing that it curbed imagination and killed 
inspiration. He began drawing very early, 
becoming, as a biographer says, ‘‘at ten 
years of age an artist, and at twelve a 
poet.’ He copied prints in his boyhood 
and haunted art salesrooms; his parents, 
more especially his mother, seem to have 
encouraged this artistic turn. 

In 1767 he was sent to a drawing-school 
in London, where he had the opportunity 
of studying from the antique, but not 
from the life. At auctions he bought en- 
gravings low, but with a discriminating 
eye; a Diirer, or after, a Raphael or a 
Michel Angelo, none of whom was popular 
in England at the time. But, as W. M. 
Rossetti notes, ‘‘the little lad Blake al- 
ready moved intellectually within his own 


cult placing of the figures, by the purity 
of his line, Blake has created a master- 
piece of simple beauty. This is one of his 
finest and sanest completed drawings. 


finished,’’ cried 
Blake, ‘‘are not even 
begun; how then can 
they be  finished?”’ 
Another anecdote 
concerns an interview 
he had with Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom 
he was submitting some designs for his 
opinion. Sir Joshua recommended less 
extravagance and more simplicity, and 
urged Blake to correct his drawing. This 
Blake seemed to regard as an affront never 
to be forgotten. “No doubt,’’ writes 
Rossetti, ‘‘the censure of the drawing of 
so severe and forcible a draughtsman as 
Blake, coming from one of so much loose 
facility as Reynolds, was particularly gall- 
ing, notwithstanding their great difference 
in age and professional standing.” 


’ In the same year that Blake first began 


18 


exhibiting in the Royal Academy he be- 
came disappointed in love, and confiding 
his distress to the daughter of his landlord, 
she expressed her pity for him. “Do you 
pity me?”’ asked Blake. ‘‘Yes, I do most 
sincerely.’’ ‘‘Then I love you for that.” 
“And I love you,’’ responded the damsel, 
who a short time later signed her mark in 
the marriage register and for forty-seven 
years was “‘an angel on earth”’ to William 
Blake, whose work had little enough sym- 
pathy during his lifetime. 


THE CREATION OF EVE 


prep 





WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 
Genesis II, 21, 22 





MICHEL ANGELO 


BHO KED to name the greatest 
artist who ever lived, nine 
people out of ten would reply 
Michel Angelo Buonarotti, 
whose long life was at once 





SEI 


an epic and a tragedy. Believing himself 
intended by nature to be a sculptor rather 
than a painter, the ambition of his life was 
to carve a tomb for Pope Julius II which, 
as he conceived it, would have been the 


3 


to your shame.’’ This allusion to his 
equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, 
never finished, wounded Leonardo to the 
quick. Conscious of his tendency to pro- 
crastinate, he reddened as his rival turned 
on his heel and strode away. 

Unhappy in Florence, Michel Angelo was 
not sorry when in 1505 Pope Julius called 
him back to Rome for the stated purpose 
of carving his tomb. But, as we tell 


most stupendous 
mausoleum in the 
world. His colossal 
statue of ‘‘Moses,”’ 
executed for this 
tomb, remained in Chapel. 
his workshop for forty 


years after the Pope 
abandoned the proj- 
ect, during all of 
which time Michel 
Angelo cherished the 
hope that his plan 
might still be carried 
out, bitterly com- 
plaining that” “‘it 
would have been bet- 
ter for him to have 
made sulphur 
matches all his life 
than to have taken 
up the desolating art- 
ist’s trade. ‘Every 
day,’ he cries, ‘I am 


HE Temptation and Fall’ is one of 

the great center panels painted by 
Michel Angelo on the ceiling of the Sistine 
It is, of course, allegorical and is 
one of his most dramatic and invigorating 
frescos. Surely not often is our imagina- 
tion roused as by this picture. Eve’s 
shrinking attitude and expression reflect 
what a guilty conscience! Note the woman- 
headed serpent coiled about the Tree of 
Life, and the angel flashing the sword 
behind the outcast pair. ‘“‘Where else,’’ 
asks Berenson, “do we encounter such 
figures as these in the Sistine Chapel to 
fulfill our dream of a great, though way- 
ward soul inhabiting a beautiful body? 
Michel Angelo created the type of man 
best fitted to subdue and control the 
earth, and, who knows! perhaps to subju- 
gate and govern more than the earth.” 


elsewhere, the sculp- 
tor was reduced to 
despair by being or- 
dered to decorate the 
ceiling of the Sistine 
Chapel. The order 
was inspired by the 
Vatican architect, 
Bramante, who be- 
lieved the _ sculptor 
would fail ignomini- 
ously. Instead, he 
succeeded in four 
years in accomplish- 
ing the mightiest se- 
ries of paintings— 
over three hundred of 
them—in the world. 
The completed work, 
however, found the 
painter an old man 
at thirty-seven. 
Working for months 
on end with his head 
thrown back had 


stoned as though I 

had crucified Christ. My youth has been 
lost, bound hand and foot to this tomb.’ ”’ 
Returning from Rome to Florence in 1501 
to carve a statue commemorating the deliv- 
erance of the city from its enemies, other 
tribulations awaited him. He was foolishly 
pitted against Leonardo da Vinci, and the 
two great men of the time, who ought to 
have been friends, were forced into en- 
mity by tattlers. Michel Angelo grew mo- 
rose and suspicious. One day in the 
street he saw Leonardo conversing with a 
group of citizens about a passage in 
Dante. Of a kindly nature, Leonardo 
hailed his rival and said to his friends, 
‘“Michel 
verses in question.’’ But the latter sus- 
pected an insult in the remark and re- 
torted: ‘‘Explain them yourself, you who 
made the model of a bronze horse and who, 
incapable of casting it, left it unfinished— 


Angelo here will explain the, 


20 


strained his neck and deranged the 
glands; his sight was so affected that for 
long afterwards he could not read a book 
or letter unless he held it above his head. 

Years passed before Michel Angelo was 
again called to Rome, in 1534, to cover 
the immense wall at the entrance to the 


Sistine Chapel with a fresco representing 


“The Last Judgment.”’ He began the work 
at sixty-one and was engaged on it more 
than five years, subsequently designing the 
mighty Domeof St. Peter’s, which remains 
the sign and symbol of the Eternal City. 
Vasari, who visited Michel Angelo when 
he was eighty-eight years of age, describes 
him as living like a poor man, eating a little 
bread and a little wine. On February 17, 
1564, feeling ill, he did not arise from bed, 
but fully conscious, dictated his will, be- 
queathing ‘‘his soul to God and his body to 
the earth.”” He died the next day: 





EDEN 


eee sh ee 


ij 





MICHEL ANGELO (1475-1564) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Genesis III, 1; 23 Sistine Chapel, Rome 





SALVATOR ROSA 


ALVATOR ROSA, tthe chief 
of the Neapolitan 
HSchool of Painting, was not 
only. a painter and etcher of 
genius, but was a poetic satirist 
and musical composer. His birthplace was 
the village of Renella, near Naples, and 
the date was 1615. The son of an architect, 
he studied music and poetry, before taking 
up painting under an artist uncle and a 
brother-in-law pupil 
of Ribera whose 
school Salvator after- 
wards frequented. 

In his youth he wan- 
dered about sketching 
in the mountainous 
regions and along the 


Ss 





subject. 


THE dramatic action of this picture of 

Cain slaying his brother Abel has 
made it a most popular treatment of the 
The artist has read between the 
lines of the Biblical text, in introducing an 
altar and a sacrifice burning thereon, 
whereas, in Genesis IV, 8, it is simply 
stated that “‘Cain talked with Abel his 


able to cope properly with a malignant 
fever, the seeds of which had been sown 
during his association with the banditti. 

In 1635 he went to Rome and found a 
patron in Cardinal Brancaccia, whose pal- 
ace at Viterbo he decorated, among other 
commissions. His progress as a painter 
was deflected for a time by the discovery 
of his poetic talent, sparkling and epigram- 
matic, which gained for him a sudden 
reputation in Rome. 
Presently he dropped 
literature as quickly 
as he had taken it up, 
and turned again to 
painting. He worked 
very hard, and was a 
painter of distinct 
power and of marked 
personality. His pic- 


shores of southern 
Italy, often falling in 
with the  banditti, 


who appear so fre- 
quently in his pic- 
tures. The death of 
his father necessitated 
his return to Naples, 
and at nineteen, as 
the mainstay of the 
family, we find him 
painting small pic- 


brother: and it came to pass, when they 
were in the field, that Cain rose up against 
Abel his brother, and slew him.” The 
odd-looking weapon which Cain ts wield- 
ing appears to be the jaw-bone of some 
animal, as evidenced by the row of teeth. 
The sheepskin on Abel is familiarly ap- 
propriate to “‘a keeper of sheep.” 


tures as a rule are 
distinguished by 
gloom and mystery, 
rich coloring, magnif- 
icent shadows, and 
broad, free, easy 
brush-work, nervous 
and emotional. There 
is a general air of 
melancholy in nearly 


tures at low prices until they attracted the 
attention of Lanfranco, through whom he 
met Falcone, under whose _ instruction 
young Salvator learned to paint battle 
scenes. , ; 

Passari records the meeting of Salvator 
and Lanfranco as due to the chance 
notice taken by the latter of a picture 
of Hagar, the servant of Abraham, and 
her child, languishing in the desert. Dis- 
played inconspicuously in a Neapolitan 
shop window, Lanfranco bought it “for a 
song’? and took it home with him, not 
recognizing the name of the artist. En- 
countering other pictures, bearing the same 
signature, he invariably bought them either 
for himself or to give to his friends. His 
enthusiasm for the work of Salvatoriello, 
as the young painter was called, had its 
effect upon the shopkeepers of Naples, 
and also upon the artist, who at once 
raised his prices and made the acquaint- 
ance of Lanfranco. Salvator’s progress, 
however, was slow, and his family had a 
faculty of absorbing all but a modicum of 
his earnings, so that he was for years un- 


22 


all his creations, and his pictures appear 
to have been turned out at top speed, not- 
withstanding their prevailing impressive- 
ness and fine quality of interpretation. 
The great ambition of Salvator Rosa was 
to excel as an historical painter, and some 
of his pictures go far to justify his aspira- 
tion. But his chief power lay in painting 
landscapes, marine views and battle scenes, 
an admirable example of the latter being 
in the Louvre. 

In Naples particularly Salvator Rosa is 
held in such repute as almost to amount 
to idolatry. His pictures are to be found 
in almost all the galleries of Europe, 
notably in the Pitti, the National Gallery 
of London, the Hermitage, the Edinburgh 
Gallery, and in almost every important 
palace in Rome. He was a skilful etcher, 
producing about ninety spirited subjects 
after his own designs, and was a very 
powerful draughtsman. Many of his pic- 
tures are signed by his conjoined initials 
arranged in at least a dozen different ways, 
and always skilfully combined. Salvator 
Rosa died in 1673. 


CAIN AND ABEL 





SALVATOR ROSA (1615-1673) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Genesis IV, 8 Doria-Pamphili Gallery, Rome 


GUSTAVE DORE 


ORE was barely fifteen and 
q still at school in his native 
town, Burger, in Alsace, when 
his father decided that he was 
wasting too much time in 
drawing pictures, and took him to Paris, 
together with an older brother who was to 
enter the Ecole Polytechnique. The in- 
tention was for Gustave to attend the 
school with his brother, but, fascinated 





As it was, he devoted himself to illustra- 
tion, not heeding the advice of his devoted 
mother to ‘‘apply himself to pure art, in- 
stead of working for the publishers who 
were making fortunes by his genius.”’ 

And so he worked prodigiously and with- 
out ceasing, illustrating Shakespeare, as 
only Doré could; then came Coleridge, 
Moore, Hood, Milton, Dante, Hugo, Gau- 
tier, and great plans were laid to illustrate 


with Paris and given 
forty-eight hours to 
decide whether he 
would go to the Poly- 
technique or return 
to Alsace, he an- 
nounced that he 
would do neither. In- 
stead he surrepti- 
tiously made some 
pictures illustrating 
“The Labors of Her- 
cules”? and submitted 
them to a Paris pub- 
lisher, who was so 
impressed by the gen- 
ius evidenced in the 
work that he ques- 
tioned whether the 


N “The Deluge,’ Dore has chosen to 

portray the desperation of man and 
the lower animals as the Great Flood was 
engulfing the uplands of the earth. What 
terrible despair is expressed in the writh- 
ing, tortured male and female figures, 
what dumb wonder in certain of the ani- 
mals, and what sinuous horror ts suggested 
by the serpent forms coiling and threshing 
the angry waters! The violence of the 
storm is revealed by the huge splintered 
tree, to which men and women still cling 
frantically. In contrast to this dramatic 
foreground scene is the great somber arkin 
the background, with its heterogeneous 
cargo, calmly afloat in a drowning world. 


the Bible. His work 
was the wonder of 
Paris, and_ every- 
where his pictures 
were in demand; but 
his canvases were too 
large and too terrible 
in subject to fit into 
private residences. 

Meanwhile his early 
Bible pictures at- 
tracted such atten- 


‘tion in London that 


a company was 
formed, agents were 
sent to Paris and 
forty large canvases 
were contracted for, 
on payment of three 


boy had done it. As- 

sured on that point, the publisher con- 
tracted with Doré to remain with him 
three years at a yearly salary of five 
thousand francs, with the proviso that the 
lad should attend an art school for four 
hours every day. 

At the end of a fortnight his visits to the 
art school were discontinued—Gustave 
knew more already than the teachers. 
As Elbert Hubbard says of Doré: ‘‘With 
such entrée into life, how was it possible 
that he should ever become a master? 
His advantages were his disadvantages, 
and all his faults sprang naturally as a 
result of his marvelous genius. He was 
the victim of facility. ... Had Doré en- 
tered the Paris art world in the conven- 
tional way, the master might have toned 
down his exuberance, taught him reserve, 
and gradually led him along until his 
tastes were formed and character devel- 
oped. And then, when he had found his 
gait and come to know his strength, the 
name of Paul Gustave Doré might have 
stood out alone as a bright star in the 
firmament—the one truly great modern.” 


24 


hundred thousand 
dollars, with a promise of more to come. 
Hubbard records: ‘‘Doré took the money, 
and hurried home to tell his adored and 
adoring mother. She was at dinner with 
some invited guests. Gustave vaulted 
over the piano, played leapfrog among 
the chairs, and turning a handspring across 
the table, incidentally sent his heels into 
a chandelier that came toppling down, 
smashing every dish upon the table, and 
frightening the guests into hysterics. ‘It’s 
nothing,’ said Madame Doré; ‘it’s noth- 
ing—Gustave has merely done a good 
day’s work. It’s his way of saying 
so.’ x” 
The ‘‘Doré Gallery”? in London proved a 
great success. But Paris refused to applaud 
as London had done, and Doré became 
dispirited. His mother, seeking to rally 
him, would remind him that he was 
“only a little over forty, and many a good 
man has never been recognized at all until 
after that— see Millet!’ But Doré drooped, 
and when his mother died, in 1881, it 
seemed to snap his last earthly tie, and he 
followed her to the grave in 1883. 


THE DELUGE 


a 


\ yi ‘ PA 









































ath 
































PAUL GUSTAVE DORE (1833-1883) From the engraving on wood 
Genesis VII, 10 





HIPPOLYTE 


IPPOLYTE FLANDRIN, one 
of the greatest religious deco- 
rators of the nineteenth cen- 
Sj] tury, was born in Lyons, 
France, in 1809, and received 
his early art training from his father, who 
was a miniature painter. At the age of 
twenty he went to Paris on foot, with his 
younger brother, Paul, and entered the 
atelier of Ingres and the Ecole des Beaux- 
Arts. During all their 
student days the 
brothers lived in dis- 
tress and poverty. 
A rift appeared in the 
clouds in 1831 when 
Hippolyte entered for 
the first time the 
competition for the 
Prix de Rome, and 
was admitted to the 
preliminary trial, but 
not to the final one. 
The next year he was 





LANDRIN’S “Confusion of Tongues at 

the Building of the Tower of Babel’ 
illustrates with telling decorative effect 
the astonishment and perplexity of the 
builders when “‘the Lord confounded their 
language, so that they could not under- 
stand one another’s speech.” 
this act was provoked by the profane am- 
bition of the dwellers in the land of Shinar 
“to build a city, and a tower whose top. 
may reach unto heaven.’ 
dividual emotions of the suddenly af- 


FLANDRIN 


But Ingres was a dangerous master to 
follow. His pupils formed around him a 
small, faithful and submissive band whose 
members, by reason of his very dominancy, 
rarely attained to any distinctive charac- 
ter of their own. Muther observes that 
not one of them, with the exception of 
Flandrin, possessed his many-sided talent, 
and that of Flandrin was in the main con- 
fined to religious paintings, for which he 
early developed a pas- 
sion and which in his 
hands for the first 
time attained a place 
of real importance in 
French art. Inciden- 
tally, ‘She followed 
much more closely 
than Ingres the paths 
of the Renaissance 
masters, particularly 
Raphael.’”’ 

Reflecting a_ close 
study of the great 


Of course, 


, 


The various in- 


successful, and going 
to Rome _ devoted 
himself definitely to 
religious painting. His 
development was 
steady and, on re- 


flicted populace are clearly portrayed by 
the imaginative artist in the attitudes and 
expressions of the men and women at the 
base of the never-to-be-completed edifice. 


Italian painters, his 
cartoons were flow- 
ingly and _ correctly 
executed with a firm 
hand. Of draughts- 
manship Flandrin 


turning to Paris in 1839, he received the 
first of a number of church commissions 
that led up to the one for his most im- 
portant work, the decoration for the great 
Church of Saint Vincent de Paul, in Paris. 
The work was first offered to Ingres, and 
‘afterwards to Delaroche. Jefused for 
private reasons by both of those artists, the 
commission as executed by Flandrin con- 
sists of a long frieze between two super- 
imposed arches, representing a procession 
of saints. It is not only his chief work, 
but is regarded as one of the finest things 
in modern figure decoration. 

At the time of his death in Rome, in 1864, 
Flandrin had projected decorations for the 
Cathedral of Strassburg. 

He painted between fifty and sixty por- 
traits and a number of easel pictures, 
among his portraits being those of Napoleon 
III, Prince Jerome Napoleon, Duchatel 
and Mlle. Maison. 

Critics of Flandrin point to him as an 
example of the influence exercised by 
Ingres on his pupils, of whom Hippolyte 
was one of the earliest and most promising. 


26 


knew all that was to be taught; but, 
justly or unjustly, he is accused of being, 
except on such occasions as his great 
Saint Vincent de Paul decorations, at 
once less richly endowed and more fanatical 
than Ingres—‘‘a purely mathematical gen- 
ius; his art a geometrical knowledge, the 
adaptation of anatomical studies to con- 
ventional forms, an arrangement of groups 
and draperies in strict accordance with 
celebrated exemplars.”’ 

In the work of Flandrin is to be discerned, 
as his peculiar property, the blond, tender, 


‘slightly melancholy face of a Christian 


maiden, his conception of the Virgin being 
essentially Nordic. In his portrait painting 
he reveals the same ascetic and pure prin- 
ciples, and thereby acquired a large clien- 
tele as the painter ofthe femme honnéte. 
These women conversed with him and 
blushed in his presence; and his appeal lies 
in his power to define grace and delicacy, 
to translate them into a nun-like appear- 
ance, which under the French Second 
Empire gained all the greater approba- 
tion, since it seldom was found in real life. 





/ 


THE CONFUSION OF ‘TONGUES 


Plan dain veehy 


HR 





HIPPOLYTE FLANDRIN (1809-1864) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Genesis XI, 7 Museum of Lille, France 


CAZIN 


TRAN CHARLES CAZIN, a 
French painter whose distinc- 

& tion is to have struck a new 
Ke note in modern landscape paint- 


ing, was born in the village of 
Samer, near Calais, in 1841, and died in 
Paris in 1901. The regret of his life was 
that he was not able to die in the old 
house where he was born. In the first 
days of his success he had bought the 
house, which some 
years before had 
passed out of the fam- 
ily, and with great 
care and expense had 
restored it to con- 
form to his boyhood 
memories. Only his 
intimates were aware 
that Cazin was so full 
of sentiment, his ac- 
quaintances being de- 
ceived by his brusque 
manner and reserve 
into believing him a 
pronounced — skeptic 
and materialist. In 
reality, sentiment was 
strong in Cazin and 
shows itself in most 
of his painting. A 
strange mixture he 
was of culture and 
instinct, of nature and art, of spontaneity 
and reserve, of care and carelessness, of 
whim and method, of simplicity and com- 
plexity, of discipline and rebellion, of 
caution and audacity, of emotion and 
reason. He was shy and mysterious, and 
at times boisterously sociable. 
His father, a country doctor, was able to 
give him a university education, at Lille. 
He early exhibited a strong artistic incli- 
nation, and while his family was not enthu- 
siastic, he was not discouraged. At nine- 
teen he went to Paris and entered the then 
popular Ecole-de-Medicine, under Lecoq 
de Boisbaudran, who also had as pupils 
Lhermitte, Rodin, Ribot, Legros and 
Fantin-Latour. Nine years later, through 
the influence of Lecoq, Cazin was made 
curator of the Museum of Tours and also 
conducted a school of drawing there. 
Then came the Franco-Prussian War, and 
for six months of the military occupation 
of Tours Cazin lived in mortal terror lest 


Ishmael. 


her voice and wept. 


N “Hagar and Ishmael’ we find mother 

and son in the desert at the close of the 
day when water and bread are gone. 
Cazin here illustrates the familiar story, 
in Genesis, telling how Abraham’s wife, 
Sarah, when ninety years old and despair- 
ing of having children of her own, sent 
Abraham to her handmaid, Hagar, hoping 
to obtain children by her. 
When, in fulfillment of His 
covenant, God later gave Isaac to Sarah, 
she grew jealous and had Hagar and 
Ishmael sent inio the desert to perish. 
Soon their food and drink were exhausted, 
and Hagar, fearing the end, lifted up 
Whereupon an angel 
called to her, saying: ‘‘Arise, lift up the 
lad... for Iwill make him a great nation.” 


.the slippery pavement. 


28 


the museum be looted. It seems to have 
been spared, largely owing to the work of 
Cazin in organizing a hospital service and 
installing beds in the museum. Surrep- 
titiously, it is related, he boxed and 
buried in the cellar of the building several 
famous pictures by Montagna that the 
Prussian authorities, well acquainted with 
the existence, if not the location, of the 
great French art treasures, were hunting 
for everywhere. 
Cazin did not really 
begin exhibiting until 
1876. It was four 
years later at the 
Paris Salon, that he 
was awarded a medal 
of the first class for 
his painting of ‘‘Ha- 
gar and Ishmael.’”’ He 
became a member of 
the Legion of Honor 
in 1882. 

As a painter, espe- 
cially of landscapes, 
Muther says, ‘‘Cazin 
has his own hour, his 
own world, his own 
men and women. His 
hour is when the sun is 
setting and the moon 
is rising, when shad- 
ows fill the world.”’ 
Cazin will paint the entrance into a 
French village, and we see a few cottages, 
a clump of thin poplars, and red-tiled roofs 
lacquered with the pale shadows of even- 
ing. Soon it will rain in torrents. Or it 
is night, and the sky is banked with 
clouds, behind which a moon is struggling. 
Lamps are lighted in the village windows, 
and an old post-chaise rolls heavily over 
Or dun-green 
shadows are cast over a solitary green 
field, in which are featured a windmill and 
a sluggish stream. Silence mysteriously 
possesses the scene, and only in the sky 
is there any movement, that being a faint 
silver flash of lightning stabbing the dark. 
Sometimes the humor of a landscape is as- 
sociated with the memory of kindred emo- 
tions which passages in the Bible or in old 
legends have awakened in Cazin. In such 
moods he painted his great Biblical or 
mythological pictures. His pictures of this 
character are peculiarly satisfying. 


The result was 


HAGAR AND ISHMAEL 


ibs a 7 as a ee siemens aedeiaiaiie a : 5 











iy JEAN CHARLES CAZIN (1841-1901) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
; Genesis XXI, 15 Luxembourg, Paris 





VERONESE 


AOLO VERONESE, whose 
fondness for painting sump- 
tuous scenes and magnificent 
ceremonials is evident in so 
many of his pictures, was, in 

addition to being one of the greatest of 

painters, the most anachronistic one that 
ever lived. On one occasion the Roman 

Church saw fit to call him to account for 


) 






many servants in his employ, and pleaded 
many precedents of seeming irreverence, 
citing as an instance Michel Angelo’s 
“Last Judgment,” in which sacred person- 
ages were represented as quite nude. And 
was he of the opinion, asked the inquisi- 
tors, that that was proper and decent? 
“Tilustrious lords,’’ acknowledged Vero- 
nese, ‘‘I had not taken such matters into 


introducing worldly accessories 


scene from sacred his- 
tory. The picture in 
question was the 
“Feast at the House 
of Levi,’’ now in the 
Venice Academy, and 
in the summer of 1573 
the painter was sum- 
moned before the tri- 
bunal of the Holy In- 
quisition to explain 
the liberties he had 
taken with gospel text 
in this picture, which 
had been painted for 
one of the churches 
of Venice. Accused 
by the tribunal of 
having introduced a 
dog in a place in the 
picture where it was 
felt that the figure of 
the Magdalen would 
have been more fit- 


into a consideration. 


N this representation of the familiar ac- 

count in Genesis, of Lot and his family 
fleeing from Sodom, Veronese has treated 
the subject with his customary disregard 
of historical exactitude, particularly in 
clothing the outstanding figures in Vene- 
tian costumes of the Renaissance period. 
Lot’s two daughters are being conducted 
by one of the angels, and although bare- 
jJooted are dressed as no two women 
would be on such an occasion. Lot him- 
self, encouraged onward by the second 
angel, is the only figure in the picture that 
is not barefooted. In the lower back- 
ground may be seen the wraithlike figure 
of Lot’s wife ‘who looked back,’”’ despite 
the angelic warning, ‘and became a pillar 
of salt.” A lurid sky effectively suggests 
the doomed city of Sodom going up in 
smoke, behind the discouraged trees. 


I paint with such study as 


is natural to me, and 
as my mind can com- 
prehend.”’ 

This, however, was 
not regarded as a 
good enough excuse, 
and having been duly 
reprimanded  Vero- 
nese was ordered to 
erase the objection- 
able figures at his own 
expense, and within 
three months. He 
painted out some; 
others still remain. 
Of his private life 
little is known. When 
nearly forty he mar- 
ried a cousin in Ve- 
rona and had two 
sons, both of whom 
became painters. His 
genius and industry, 
accompanied by good 
husbandry, brought 


ting, Veronese de- 
fended himself by saying that he had 
supposed the same license was granted to 
painters as was allowed to ‘‘poets and 
fools,’’ and frankly confessed that when- 
ever it was necessary to fill in the empty 
spaces of his compositions he freely intro- 
duced figures of his own invention, and 
while ready to show all honor to the 
Magdalen, he did not feel that in the 
place specified her figure would harmonize 
with the composition of his picture. 

Asked if he considered it suitable to 
introduce such figures as dwarfs, buffoons 
and drunken Germans—these last being 
regarded by Italians of that day as rank 
heretics, and one of whom the painter had 
realistically portrayed in the act of stanch- 
ing a bleeding nose—Veronese admitted 
it was not, but said that he had introduced 
such figures in order to show that the 
master of the house was rich and had 


30 


him considerable wealth, despite his lavish 
manner of living. John C. Van Dyke sees 
in the work of Veronese “pomp and glory 
carried to the highest pitch, but with all 
seriousness of mood and truthfulness in 
art. It was beyond Titian in variety, rich- 
ness, ornament, facility; but it was below 
him in sentiment, sobriety and depth of in- 
sight. Titian, with all his sensuous beauty, 
appealed to the higher intelligence, while 
Veronese . . . appealed more positively to 
the eye by luxurious color-setting and mag- 
nificence of invention.” 

Honored and universally admitted to be 
of the highest genius, Veronese was a man 
of amiable disposition, of undisputed char- 
acter, a good neighbor and citizen. Dying 
in 1588, his body lies in the Church of 
San Sebastiano—an appropriate resting- 
place for one by whose genius its walls 
had been so richly decorated. 


THE BURNING OF SODOM 





PAOLO VERONESE (1528- 
Genesis XIX, 24 


Louvre, Paris 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 


1588) 


TIEPOLO 


— J 


TAHE last great name in the 
Y illustrious roll of Venetian mas- 
Aig ters was Giovanni Battista 
NN y Tiepolo, who was born in 
Venice, in 1696, and died in 
Madrid, in 1770. His father, a ship captain 
and merchant of marine goods, left him a 
considerable estate and he seems never to 
have experienced the vicissitudes that at- 
tend the average artist. The sources of his 





jealousy and hatred of Raphael Mengs, 
who had been Court Painter under the 
preceding monarch. 

No account of Tiepolo would be complete 
without mention of the two models who 
appear so frequently in his pictures. Most 
important was the aforementioned Chris- 
tina, daughter of a Venetian gondolier. who 
accompanied the artist to Spain and ap- 
pears to have been a member of his house- 


early inspiration were 


Titian and Paulo 
Veronese, especially 
the latter, whom, 


however, he excelled 
as a ceiling decorator, 
in which field he has 
never had a rival. 
The amount of wall 
space he covered with 
his magnificent fres- 
cos is nothing short 
of stupendous, besides 
altar-pieces, etchings 
and finished sketches 
for many of his works. 
His ceiling frescos, 
where the subject isa 
secular one, show the 
same striking arrange- 
ment of masses as do 


his religious compositions. 


BEDIENT to God’s command, Abra- 

ham was preparing to slay his beloved 
son, Isaac, and make of him a burnt 
offering, and “stretched forth his hand 
and took the knife,’ when the Angel of 
the Lord said, “‘Lay not thine hand upon 
the lad, neither do thou anything unto 
him; for now I know that theu fearest 
God, seeing thou hast not withheld thine 
only son from Me.” Such is the scene, 
described in Genesis, that is dramatically 
represented in this picture: Tiepolo has 
no scriptural warrant for painting Isaac 
blindfolded, but it adds much to the nar- 
rative quality of the picture. Behind Isaac 
may be seen the head of the ram, which 
Abraham substituted for his son. 


Tiepolo nearly 


hold. ‘She had a 
rare perfection: large 
and svelt, with a 
queenly carriage, an 
exquisite profile, oval 
face, eyes of a Cir- 
cassian—piquant, one 
could say, the neck 
of a swan, the hands 
of a patrician, form 
supple and full.”” In 
fact, we read, Tiepolo 
never used any other 
female model, and her 
image is to be found 
alike in the altar- 
piece and on the 
vault of ducalpalaces. 
She appears now as 
a saint, now as an 
historical character, 


or again as a mythological personage. 


always introduces a four-horse chariot in 
them, the spirited horses rearing and ca- 
reering across the vaults of the sky, show- 
ing his marvellous powers of foreshorten- 
ing. Although many of his finest frescos are 
to be found in the churches of his native 
city, Tiepolo spent many years outside of 
Italy engaged upon commissions for for- 
eign potentates. 

The last great honor paid him was to be 
called to Spain to decorate the Royal 
Palace in Madrid for Charles III, who had 
lately ascended the throne. Accompanied 
by his two sons and his model, Christina, 
he established a residence in the Spanish 
capital in 1762, being allowed, in addition 
to the expenses of the journey, 2000 rubles 
of gold a year and 500 ducats for a carriage. 
Immediately upon his arrival at Madrid 
his health began to fail, and he made his 
will and deposited it with the royal notary. 
He lived eight years longer, however, 
superintending vast works for the Royal 
Palace, and is said to have incurred the 


Tiepolo’s other model was a Moorish 
slave who was brought to Venice as a 
Corsair prisoner. The artist bought him, 
instructed him in the Christian religion, 
to which he became a convert, and used 
him as a model during ten of the most 
productive years of his industrious life. 

Tiepolo seems to have amassed a con- 
siderable fortune. Of his gambling wife, 
who does not appear to have accom- 


. panied him on his travels, an anecdote is 


32 


told of how one evening, having lost all 
the money she had brought with her, she 
rose to go, when her opponent volun- 
teered to play for the sketches in her hus- 
band’s studio. She played again, and 
lost. Again her wily opponent offered to 
play for her country villa at Zianigo. A 
third time she lost; but fortunately her 
businesslike son, who was absent from ° 
Venice at the time, returned home in time 
to cancel her debt, but not without dis- 
posing of a large number of sketches by 
the absent master. 


THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC 





GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO (1696-1770) Metropolitan Museum of Art 
Genesis XXII, 10 New York City 


LEON GEROME 


A GENIUS for painting first 
manifested itself in Jean 
Léon Géréme, and when in 
8 middle age his inspiration as 
e) a painter gradually began to 


SEC 


flag—at the age of fifty-four, to be exact— 
he made his début as a sculptor of the 
first rank. Of no other artist is the de- 
velopment of such a progressive dual na- 
ture recorded. Géréme was born in 1824 





“Gladiators before Cesar,’’ which was 
exhibited in 1859. 

Gér6éme was a persistent and enthusiastic 
traveller, spending as much as a year in 
the Danube provinces at one time, and 
another year in Egypt, stopping at Con- 
stantinople on the way. He was made 
professor of painting at the Ecole des 
Beaux-Arts in 1865, won a medal of 
honor at the Universal Exposition a short 


at Vesoul, Haute- 
Saone, France, and it 
seems to have been 
foreordained that he 
should be an artist. 
From the time he 
could hold a brush 
andpalette, his father, 
who was a goldsmith, 
encouraged the artis- 
tic tendencies of his 
son and sympatheti- 
cally directed his 
early efforts. 

Léon’s copy of a pic- 
ture by Decamps, 
made at the age of 
fifteen, chanced to be 
seen by a friend of 
the then immensely 
popular Delaroche, 
and led directly to his 
entering the atelier of 
that master in Paris. 


ACCORDING to Genesis, the servant 

of Abraham, having been despatched 
by his master into Mesopotamia in quest 
of a wife for his son, Isaac, reached the 
city of Nahor at the time of day when the 
women were accustomed to draw water 
from a well near the city. And Rebecca 
came to the well with her pitcher. from 
which she bade Abraham’s servant drink, 
and then offered to “draw water for the 
camels also.... And she hasted, and 
emptied her pitcher into the trough.” 
Such is the scene faithfully portrayed in 
this picture, which follows the scriptural 
account in every detail. As a reward for 
her action, Rebecca was invited to accom- 
pany the servant back to Abraham, to 
“find favor in his eyes’? and what is more 
to the point, in those of Isaac. She ac- 
cepted the invitation and in due time de- 
parted with the blessings of her family. 


time after and also 
was made an officer 
and commander of 
the Legion of Honor. 

His indefatigable in- 
dustry is attested by 
the immense number 
of pictures he paint- 
ed, in addition to his 


later activities in 
sculpture. Of several 
hundred canvases, 


Géréme himself con- 
sidered his best work 
on religious subjects 
to be his studies of 
“Rebecca at the 


- Well,’”’ and of ‘‘Moses 


overthrowing the 
hosts of Amalek,”’ 
and the historical pic- 
tures of the Roman 
gladiators and the 
great ‘‘Pollice Verso,”’ 


Three years later he 
went with Delaroche 
to Rome, without the formality of com- 
peting for the Prix de Rome, when Dela- 
roche was appointed director of the French 
Academy in the Eternal City. With the 
exception of a few months with Gleyre, 
all Géréme’s early training was received 
from Delaroche, many of whose pictures 
he is said to have assisted in painting. 

In 1847 Géréme was unsuccessful in the 
competition for the Prix de Rome, but he 
returned to Paris with his celebrated pic- 
ture, a ‘‘Greek Cockfight,’’ now in the 
Luxembourg, which was exhibited at the 
Salon of that year, and which was the 
sensation of the day. In the following 
year he won the second-class medal at the 
Salon, at which pictures by Géréme were 
exhibited almost annually thereafter. All 
the most splendid qualities of the art of 
Gér6éme appear in the great picture of the 


which shows a gladi- 
ator standing over his 
conquered antagonist, awaiting the sig- 
nal of the Vestal Virgins, the thumb 
turned down, which was, according to an 
erroneous supposition, the death-sign in 
the arena. 


. Observe the sprightly way in which Géréme 


34 


recalls the time and place of his birth: 
“To prevent seven cities disputing the 
honor of being my native one, I certify 
that it is Vesoul. No miracle took place 
at the time of my birth, which is surprising. 
The lightning did not even flash in a clear 
sky.’’ He goes on to thank his father for 
having taught him ‘‘much Latin and con- 
siderable Greek,’’ but regrets that one of 
them was not the Italian language, “‘which 
has been of enormous service to me 
in my travels.’’ Géréme died in Paris, 
in 1904, mourned, as he had long been 
honored, by the French nation. 








4 


JEAN LEON GEROME (1824-1904) Courtesy Current Literature Publishing Co, 
Genesis XXIV 





PALMA VECCHIO 


-_ 





the features of the men and women of 
well-known families among the nobility of 
that time in Venice, notably of the women, 
of whom Palma may be said to be the 
painter par excellence, and whom he 
frequently idealized by presenting them 
in classic costumes.”’ 

The fact that he never signed or dated any 
of his canvases makes it impossible to as- 
sign any chronological places to his pic- 


HE Meeting of Jacob and Rachel’’ was 

a favorite theme with early Italian 
painters, and this idyllic interpretation by 
Palma Vecchio has been admired for cen- 
turies for its simplicity and tenderness of 
expression. The figures are clothed as 
Italian peasants in Palma’s time, and the 
scene depicted ts the final return of Jacob. 
To win Rachel’s hand he had served seven 
years, but when he claimed her he was 
told that she could not marry while her 
older sister was unwed. To make Rachel 
his wife he had to serve an additional 
seven years. At the left a shepherd lies 
beside a well, ‘“‘a whole Arcadia of intense 
yearning,” says Symonds, “in the eyes of 
sympathy he fixes upon the lovers.” 


tures. For only two 
of his paintings are 
approximate dates as- 
signed. It is known 
that in 1520 he was 
commissioned by Ma- 
rin Querini to paint 
an altar-piece for the 
Church of Sant’ An- 
tonio in Venice; and 
that in 1525 he agreed 
to paint for a lady of 
the Malipero family 
an altar-piece repre- 
senting ‘‘The Adora- 
tion of the Magi,”’ to 
decorate the island- 


church of Sant’ Elena. 


In July 1528, Palma 
made his will, be- 
queathing all of his 
estate, but twenty 


WHAHAT certain paintings by Palma 
Vecchio should have been, and 
still are, mistaken for the work 
NN yy of Titian is reason enough in 
itself to accord him a niche in 
the gallery of immortals. Critics have long 
differed in their estimates of this sixteenth 
century painter of whose life and person- 
ality very little is known. Crowe and 
Cavalcaselle are of the opinion that he 
was a pioneer who 
“‘shared with Giorgi- 
one and Titian the 
honor of modernizing 
and regenerating Ve- 
netian art,’’ and that 
“from the borders of 
Piedmont to the Gulf 
of Trieste there was 
not a city of any pre- 
tensions that did not 
feel the influence of 
his art.”’ 
Palma Vecchio, signi- 
fying Palma the elder, 
to distinguish him 
from his grandnephew 
of the same name, 
also a painter, early 
signed himself Jaco- 
mo de Antonio de 
Negreti: — It “is\ inot 
clear just why he adopted the name 
Palma. His birthplace was a village in 
the Valley of the Brembo, not far from 
Bergamo, Italy. The date, according to 
Vasari, was 1480, and it is stated, on the 
same authority, that he died in Venice at 
the age of forty-eight. The house in 
which he was born and lived in his youth, 
before going to Venice, is still pointed 
out as la ca’ del pittur—the house of the 
painter. 
It is believed that Palma went to Venice 
when very young, and that, together with 
Titian and Giorgione, he there entered the 
studio of Giovanni Bellini, whose influence 
is discernible in some of his early works. 
Excepting occasional visits to his native 
Lombardy, where examples of his work 
may still be seen, Palma spent a busy life 
in Venice, painting altar-pieces, Sante 
Conversazioni or Holy Family and Saints 
—in which groups of saints in adoration 
of the Madonna and Child are depicted in 
peaceful landscapes—and in ‘portraying 


36 


ducats, to two nephews and a niece, 
children of a brother who had died four 
years previously, and who were very dear 
to their bachelor uncle. The twenty 
ducats were to be distributed among his 
poor relatives in the vicinity of Bergamo 
and in Venice; and, by the painter’s de- 
sire, prayers were to be said for his soul 
in the Sanctuary of Assisi. The wit- 
nesses to his will were three of his fellow 
countrymen, resident in Venice—a wine- 
seller, a fruiterer, and a dyer. 

From the manner in which the painter 
alludes to himself in this document it has 
been surmised that his health had been 
failing for some time. Whether this was 
so, or whether his last sickness was of 
short duration, it is recorded that he died 
two days after signing his will, leaving in 
his studio more than forty canvases to be 
finished by his pupils. His ashes are in 
the vault of the Confraternity of the Holy 
Spirit, of which he had been a member, in 
the Church of San Gregorio, Venice. 


THE MEETING OF JACOB AND RACHAEL 





PALMA VECCHIO (1480-1528) 
Genesis XXX, 11 


ALEXANDRE GABRIEL DECAMPS 


HIS French painter, whose 
name is so often associated 
with that of Delacroix, was 
indifferent to nothing in na- 
ture or history: he showed as 
much’ enthusiasm for a pair of tanned 
street urchins playing in the sunshine of a 
Paris concourse as for Biblical figures and 
old-world epics. .He has painted hens 
pecking in a barnyard, dogs on the chase 
and in the kennel, 
monkeys as scholars 
and musicians in all 





CAMPS’ 


“Joseph Sold by His 


he went on a pilgrimage to the Greek 
Archipelago, Constantinople and Asia Mi- 
nor, including the Holy Land, which be- 
came a voyage of discovery for French 
painting. 

Even before visiting the East he had laid 
the foundation of that French school of 
Orientalism that was later to include 
Géréme, Ziem, Constant and Frére. But 
following his sojourn in Asia Minor, every- 
thing he painted— 
even in his Biblical 
pictures— reflects the 


but impossible situa- 
tions. Someone has 
termed his ‘‘Battle of 
Tailleborg’’ as the 
only picture of a 
battle in the Ver- 
sailles Museum. 
Characterizing all his 
work there is an indi- 
viduality, not of the 
very first order, but 
one that is charming 
and that assures him 
of a very high place 
among his contempo- 
raries of the early 
nineteenth century. 

Decamps was born in 
Paris, in 1803. His 
first work that ap- 


Brethren’ astonishesat the first glance. 
The irregularities of its foreground—some 
rocks, a spring from which a woman is 
taking water --has little or no relation to 
the main subject, which ts relegated to the 
middle distance. The figure of Joseph, 
charmingly drawn, is instinct with grace. 
The whole group of Israelite merchants is 
very fine. The figures’in silhouette against 
the sky have a purity and distinction 
worthy of the Old Masters. The transac- 
tion is not taking place in a barren and 
waterless desert, nor in an oasis. These 
are the intermediate pasture lands, where 


Abraham, Jacob and Laban tended their. 


flocks, and where the history of the world 
is generally believed to have begun. 


East of modern times. 
As Muther - says, 
“The largeness of line 
in his Oriental land- 
scapes is expressive 
of something so pa- 
triarchal and Bibli- 
cal, and of such a 
dreamy, mystical po- 
etry that, in spite of 
their modern garb, 
the figures seem like 
visions from a far 
distance.”’ 

Decamps is never 
trivial. All his pic- 
tures soothe and cap- 
tivate the eye, how- 
ever much they may 
lower the _ expecta- 


peared in the Salon of 1827—painted in 
his twenty-fourth year—was not at once 
pleasing to his fellow-artists, but its 
originality and style attracted the public 
and paved the way for a considerable 
vogue. 

Of early instruction Decamps is said to 
have received little, regarding the lessons 
of his one and only master of importance, 
Abel de Pujol, as ‘“‘monotonous.” He 
preferred to grope his way alone, but in 
after years regretted his lack of early 
training. Once, visiting the studio of 
Millet, he exclaimed, ‘‘Ah, you are a lucky 
fellow; you can do all you wish to do!”’ 
What has been called the “artistic con- 
science’? was always plaguing Decamps, 
making him discontented with even his best 
work. Having made a success in 1829 
with an imaginary picture of the East, he 
became curious to see how far the reality 
corresponded with his ideas of Turkey; 
and in that year—anticipating Delacroix— 


38 


tions raised by introductory praises of 
them. There was a time when it was 
said that ‘“‘Delacroix painted with color and 
Decamps with light,’’ but such an ob- 
serving critic as Muther, while admitting 
that Decamps has “admirable brilliancy 
of technique,” asserts that “he was no 
painter of light.’’ In fact, ““Decamps at- 
tained the effect ot light in his pictures by 
the darkening of shadows, precisely in the 
manner of the old school. To make the 
sky bright, he threw the foreground into 
opaque and heavy shade.” 

Decamps touched the high-water inark of 
his popularity in 1839. But the encroach- 
ing authority of the classic school at that 
time made Decamps uncertain of himself 
and discouraged with his profession. In 
this mood he is said to have burned or 
otherwise destroyed many of his canvases, 
abandoning art for many years. He lost 
his life in the summer of 1860 as the result 
of an accident while riding to the hunt. 


JOSEPH SOLD BY HIS BRETHREN 





ALEXANDRE GABRIEL DECAMPS (1803-1860) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Genesis XXVII, 28 ; 





JAMES JOSEPH TISSOT 


gy) AUL on the road to Damascus 

did not suffer a more startling 
8 conversion, or spiritual trans- 
ference, than did the French 
painter, James Tissot, at the 
age of fifty. Hitherto he had been a dis- 
tinguished painter of fashionable life and 
the feminine world. For years he enjoyed 
a great vogue in London, where his pic- 
tures were well hung at the Royal Academy 
and were regarded as 
among the best shown 
there. But he was not 
distinguished for any 
devotion to serious 





I T was at the time of the great famine in 

Egypt, that followed the seven years of 
plenty, in which Joseph had stored vast 
quantities of foodstuffs in the granaries 


cerned, the point of view of historical accu- 
racy, as regards details of dress, accessories 
and surroundings, was never even con- 
sidered. 

The Renaissance masters of Italy repre- 
sented their own Italian surroundings in 
their religious art without any conscious- 
ness of incongruity or anachronism. It 
was habitual with them to employ the 
costume of the period, and although a 
somewhat more gen- 
eralized and _ ideal 
point of view is fre- 
quently found as re- 
gards costume and 


subjects and was 
wholly unknown in 
the field of religious 
art. His change of 
subject matter was 
the result of a great 
personal sorrow, ex- 
perienced in the death 
of a dear friend, and 
after beginning his 
great series of gospel 
illustrations he is not 
known to have ever 
undertaken any pic- 
ture other than of 
religious character. 


of Pharaoh. His brethren, who long ago 
had treacherously sold Joseph into Egyft, 
had now come from the land of Canaan 
to Egypt in quest of food, and are here 
pictured at the moment when Joseph made 
himself known unto them. Their guilty 
consciences are reflected in their furtive 
expressions, as kneeling before their 
powerful brother, they study him anx- 
iously. Joseph, however, is too much 
moved by the sight of his brethren and 
by the news that his father, Jacob, is still 
alive, to harbor a vengeful feeling. On 
the contrary, he sends them homeward 


accessories, historical 
accuracy was never 
attempted. 

The significance of 
the Tissot pictures is 
indicated by the art- 
ist himself, who writes 
that on his return to 
Paris from Jerusalem, 
in 1887, he went to 


see his father, a 
Christian of the old 
school. “T showed 


him my sketches and 
studies; and when he 
saw the appearance 


Born at Nantes in 
1836, it was in 1886 
that Tissot first went to Palestine with a 
view to illustrating a life of Christ. He 
spent ten years in the Holy Land in serious 
study of the life and archaeology of the 
country; and the result was a series of 
three hundred and fifty paintings, mostly 
water colors, and’ the one hundred and 
twelve pen and ink sketches purchased for 
the Brooklyn Museum in 1903, by popu- 
lar subscription. Previously the Tissot 
Collection had been widely shown in Eu- 
rope and had been exhibited in all the 
principal cities of the United States, with 
almost fabulous success in point of inter- 
est and attendance. 

It is a remarkable fact that Tissot is the 
first artist of modern times to aim at ab- 
solute historical accuracy in a complete 
and comprehensive series of Bible pictures. 
As far as modern art is concerned, no cor- 
responding series illustrating the life of 
Christ has ever been attempted and, so 
far as historical religious art is con- 


with much food, money and raiment. 


40 


and the exact propor- 
tions: of the holy 
places, pereiaes of Golgotha, he ex- 
claimed: ‘Then I must alter all my pre- 
conceived ideas of these things. What! is 
Calvary not a high mountain in the shape 
of a sugar-loaf, covered with rocks and 
brushwood?’ ‘Well, no,’ I replied, ‘the 
mount of Calvary, though it occupied the 
summit of the city, was, at the most, only 
22 or 23 feet high. The Holy Sepulchre, 
too, was close beside it, and among quite 
different surroundings from those usually 
pictured. The Christian world has had its 
imagination misled by the fancies of 
painters; and there is a whole stock of 
images that must be driven out of the 
mind, before it can be familiarized with 
notions that are a little nearer the truth.’ ” 
Tissot spent the last years of his life 
illustrating the Old Testament. He died 
in 1902, before the completion of this 
work, but a considerable portion of it was 
finished and is now in the possession of the 
New York Public Library. 


JOSEPH MAKES HIMSELF KNOWN 





JAMES JOSEPH TISSOT (1836-1902) Courtesy Current Literature Publishing Co. 
Genesis XLV, 3 


REMBRANDT 


UCH concerning the life of 
the greatest of Dutch painters, 
Rembrandt van Rijn (Rem- 
brandt of the Rhine), re- 
mains shrouded in darkness 

and mystery. Enough is known, however, 

to indict the Dutch people of his time 
for their treatment of him in his declining 
years and of their indifferent notice of his 
death and burial by the hands of charity. 


7 
D 


Ee Oa 


quiet blue eyes. Taking the boy by the 
hand that had painted this precursor of 
priceless masterpieces, the teacher led him 
out before the class and bade them look 
upon their master. 

From that time on Rembrandt was re- 
garded by the little art world of Leyden 
as a prodigy. Like William Cullen Bry- 
ant, who wrote ‘“Thanatopsis’’ when 
scarcely eighteen, and writing for sixty 


Rembrandt was the 
fifth of six children 
born to a Leyden 
miller and his wife, 
whose maternal fea- 
tures were to be im- 
mortalized by her son. 
The year of his birth 
is believed to. have 
been 1606. A hun- 
dred pictures he made 
of his mother are 
known to exist. Hum- 
ble as they were in 
station, his parents 
sent the future paint- 
er to a grammar- 
school where he made 


VAINLY because of the venerable fig- 

ure of the patriarch in Rembrandt’s 
“Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph,’’ is 
the picture a memorable addition to his 
extensive number of paintings of Biblical 
subjects.. Itillustrates Genesis XLVIII, 14. 
“And Jacob stretched out his right hand 
and laid it upon Ephraim’s head, who was 
the younger, and his left hand upon Ma- 
nasseh’s head, guiding his hands wittingly; 
for Manasseh was the first-born.”” Joseph 
protesting to this was assured by his 
father that Ephraim, the younger, would 
be set before Manasseh. Rembrandt has 
introduced the supposed’ mother of the 


years thereafter never 
equalled it, or Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti, who 
wrote ‘‘The Blessed 
Damozel’”’ at the same 
age, Rembrandt had 
an extraordinary pre- 
cocity. It is probably 
true that he could 
not then have pro- 
duced an_ elaborate 
composition, but, as 
Elbert Hubbard ob- 
serves of this great 
Dutch master, ‘“‘His 
faces were Rem- 
brandtesque from the 


such slow progress 
with his studies that 
the master tried flogging, and the next 
day found a picture of himself on the 
blackboard, his face portrayed as anything 
but flattering. Young Rembrandt was 
sent home to fetch his father. The father 
came, studied the picture in his deliberate 
Dutch way and announced eventually that 
the resemblance was striking. Mynheer 
Harmen van Rijn then returned home and 
stated the case to his wife. ‘‘Well,’’ said 
the mother, “if he will not do anything 
but draw pictures, I think we had better 
let him draw pictures.”’ 

So Rembrandt, at fourteen, was placed 
with a Leyderf painter to study the rudi- 
ments of art. He appears not to have been 
popular with his fellow pupils and to have 
been constantly reprimanded by the mas- 
ter for his tardiness. One day he was 
unusually late in getting to the studio and 
explained that he had been up all night 
doing a picture. By request of the teacher 
the lad returned home and brought back 
the picture—a woman’s face, homely, 
wrinkled, weather-beaten, but with a look 
of love and patience and loyalty in the 


boys without scriptural warrant. 


42 


very first—those of 
the only artist who, 
Ruskin thought, 
could ever paint a wrinkle.” 

Rembrandt remained in Leyden until his 
twenty-fifth year when he went to Am- 
sterdam, and ere long, in 1632, painted his 
famous ‘‘Lesson in Anatomy,’’ which es- 
tablished his reputation as a painter. 
Then came Saskia van Uylenburg, and 
“the form and face of this dainty little 
patrician, an orphan, suddenly becomes 
the prevailing theme both in the painted 
and etched work of Rembrandt.’” Rem- 
brandt and Saskia van Uylenburg were 
married in 1634. “Those first few years of 
their married life read like a fairy tale. All 
was for Saskia—his life, his fortune, his 
work, his all. Even though Saskia protested 
mildly against his extravagance, the master 
would have his way.” 

Then clouds began to gather. Two of 
their children died in quick succession, and 
in 1642 Saskia herself died, leaving an 
eight-months-old son, Titus. “The Night 
Watch,”’ completed in that year and now 
ranked among his achievements, almost 
destroyed the contemporary reputation of 
the painter. : 


JACOB BLESSING THE SONS OF JOSEPH 





REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606-1669) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Genesis XLVIII, 16 Cassel Gallery 


TIEPOLO 


VEN in the fulness of the 
eighteenth century Venice pos- 
¥ sessed one great Renaissance 
artist, Tiepolo. It was still the 
loveliest and gayest, if not 
any longer the richest city in the world, 
the trysting place of pleasure and ele- 
gance; as of old, the scene of magnificent 
processions and imposing ceremonies. Life 
was easy and comparatively free, in a 
Marvellous setting, 
enveloped in a trans- 
parent atmosphere 
which the _ Renais- 
sance masters ren- 
dered with such in- 
finite truth and 
charm. Tiepolo, as 
Salomon Reinach re- 
cords, gave final 
expression to these 
splendors. “His ge- 
nius is akin to that 
of Tintoretto, but he 
has more moderation, 
more elegance; he was 
the painter of a pol- 
ished aristocracy, 
conscious of its supe- 
riority to the crowd 
whose religion, modi- 
fied by Spain, the Counter-reformation 
and the Jesuits, was a subtle mingling of 
devotion and worldliness.”’ 
last of the Old Masters and the first of the 
moderns,” and nearly all the great deco- 
rators of the nineteenth century were in- 
spired by him. 

Tiepolo was a manifest proof of how much 
native genius can do, aided by earnest 
study and abetted by a very good mem- 
ory. No one understood better than this 
Venetian painter the reason of light and 
shade, and no one knew how to render 
light more splendidly in the difficult ef- 
fects of the open air, of what Leonardo 
called the universal light of the air in the 
country. On his palette, says Molmenti, 
“there are vivid transparencies, opaline 
distances, sunsets of the purple Venetian 
sky. His genius, open to all sensations, 
to all beauties, comprehended a kingdom, 
various, fantastic, gay, at the same time 
never removed from the real. He did not 
know how to contain the impetuosity of 
his inspiration, the irresistible need of giv- 





master, 
same subject. 


N his “Finding of Moses,” Tiepolo shows 

the same disregard for historical accu- 
racy that his Venetian predecessor and 
Veronese, did in painting the 
The scene ts Italian, rather 
than Egyptian, as witness the halberdiers, 
the costumes of the women and the gro- 
tesquely attired dwarf. In the left fore- 
ground, pointing, is the sister of Moses, 
who is asking Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘‘Shail 
I go and call for thee a nurse of the 
Hebrew women, that she may nurse the 
child for thee?” and thus succeeds in re- 
storing Moses to his mother. 
has not neglected to paint in the “ark of 
bulrushes” from which the infant has just 
been removed by the royal servants. 


He was ‘“‘the - 


44 


ing life and color to his images, which 
effervesced in his brain, and in whom the 
ideal and the real, the form and the 
thought, are tempered by an ineffable har- 
mony.” 

Tiepolo, although not of the stature of 
Titian and Veronese, is yet a giant, dan- 
gerous of imitation, like all innovators, 
who knew perfectly how to fuse emotion 
and intellect. Of him much was written 
while he was. still 
alive, because his age 
recognized his superi- 
ority to his contem- 
poraries. His friend 
Antonio Zanetti, a 
year after his death, 
in 1770, wrote: “A 
beautiful example of 
happy painting, of 
the sureness of the 
brush, and of ready 
execution was our 
Tiepolo, who found 
his hand always obe- 
dient to express upon 
his canvases as much 
as his intellect con- 
ceived. His genius 
was conscious of it- 
self from its earliest 
years; his style was original from the 
time he first began to paint.”’ 

Taine, in discussing the Venetian school, 
refers to Tiepolo as ‘‘a mannerist, who in 
his religious pictures looks for melodrama 
and in his allegorical pictures for move- 
ment and effect: who overthrows his col- 
umns, topples his pyramids, tears his 
clouds, scatters his people, in a manner to 
give to his scenes the aspect of a volcano 
in eruption.”’ 

A favorite with women, Tiepolo seldom 


The artist 


-assigns to the brown maiden of the people 


the réle of the Madonna, but usually de- 
picts ladies of the highest circles; pale 
countesses with tired laughter and with 
wonderful white hands, who know strange 
excitements and are avid of sensations. 
In his perception of movement, an almost 
imperceptible crook of the finger, a shrug 
of the shoulder, a quick turn of the head, 
is sufficient. It is no accident that his 
best works treat themes of the Roman de- 
cline; for the same time had come to pass 
in the history of Venice. 


THE FINDING OF MOSES 


ONG ge 
ey | 





GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO (1696-1770) Edinburgh Gallery 
Exodus, II, 6 


FRANCISCO COLLANTES 


PANISH art, for some reason 
inexplicable in a people of such 
# emotional sensitiveness, has 
produced, throughout its va- 
rious transformations, but a 
very small number of landscape painters. 
During the entire sixteenth century, 
Spanish landscape art, treated solely as an 
accessory, only reflects tradition and a 
formal mannerism entirely devoid of life. 
It was in Andalusia, 


YY) 





where the first awak- 
ening realistic tend- 
encies were most 
marked, that the rich 
merchants of Seville 
brought about an ac- 
quaintance with the 
painters of the Neth- 
erlands, not enjoyed 
by the rest of Spain. 
A pioneer emissary, 
in this relation, was 
one Pedro de Moya, 
a fellow pupil of Mu- 
rillo’s, who paid a 
visit to Flanders early 
in the seventeenth 
century and studied 
Van Dyck. In 1642 
we hear of him re- 
turning to Seville, fol- 
lowing the death of 
Van Dyck, vastly im- 


OLLANTES’ Moses, in this depiction 
of the burning-bush miracle, is a 
simple Spanish shepherd, and the anach- 
ronism of very well painted costume and 
accessories does not seem for a moment 
to have disturbed the artist. 
tending his flock, and has come to the 
mount of Horeb where “‘the Angel of the 
Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire 
out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, 
and, behold, the bush burned with fire, 
and the bush was not consumed.” 
curiosity aroused by this phenomenon, 
Moses investigates, and is rewarded by 
hearing a voice from the bush appoint 
him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, 
unto “a land flowing with milk and honey.” 
The influence of the Flemish school is 
observable in the treatment of the trees and 
the handling of light and shade. 
tower in the distance of an essentially 


Carducho. His first works were religious 
compositions, in which the hand and eye 
of the pupil were plainly guided by those 
of the master. Presently, however, a 
marked change occurred in the style of 
Collantés, when he began to paint land- 
scapes, and the influence of the Flemish 
painters, particularly of Van Dyck, may 
be detected in such canvases as ‘“‘Moses 
and the Burning Bush,” as well as several 
other pictures in the 
Museum of Madrid. 
Incidentally, they 
have a force of ex- 
pression and qualities 
of strength that one 
does not find in the 


Moses is_ paintings of Car- 
ducho. 
It is anew manner, a 
transfiguration, and 


by the vigor of the 
effects, by the more 
deeply felt arrange- 
ment of line, as well 
as by the intensity 
of the coloring, the 
landscapes of Collan- 
tés are comparable to 
the best productions 
of the Venetians and 
the Bolognese. With 
a unity of composi- 
tion always admir- 


His 


A ruined 


proved by his six ‘ 2 : able, and sometimes 
months. with ou) the pantie landscape gives a not unpleasing splendid, Collantés 
Flemish master, and (ouch of mediaeval romance to the scene. harmonizes naively 
‘the brought with him realistic details in 


copies of several paintings by Van Dyck, 
also of many other major works which he 
saw in the Netherlands ” 

In this emancipation work Pedro de Moya 
supplemented the influence on the infant 
School of Madrid of those artists who had 
been summoned from Italy to decorate 
the Escorial near Madrid. Notable among 
them were the brothers Vincenzo and 
Bartolommeo Carducho, who dominated 
and who epitomized this phase of transition 
in Spanish art. In their school was devel- 
oped Francisco Collantés, one of the most 
remarkable painters of his time and a, 
compeer of Velasquez and Murillo. 
Collantés was born in the Spanish capital 
city in 1599. While a youth in his early 
teens he entered the studio of Vincenzio 


46 


such a way as to give his canvases a dis- 
tinct and piquant originality. 
Collantés left many pictures of varying 
merit, some of them superb, some merely 
good. At the same time he was not a 
prodigal painter; his output was rather 
limited, considering the fact that his paint- 
ing life covered a period of nearly half a 
century. Unhappily, some of his religious 
compositions have been lost. A rocky 
ruggedness characterizes most of his land- 
scapes, and usually prominent in them is 
a tower or an aqueduct in ruins, as in the 
accompanying picture. 

Collantés died in Madrid in 1656. No 
pupils of his are known, but his style or 
manner, principally in landscape work, has 
inspired a number of imitators. 


MOSES AND THE BURNING BUSH 





FRANCISCO COLLANTES (1599-1656) 
Exodus, ITI, 2 


ALMA-TADEMA 


B= MONG the most famous of 
modern classical painters who 

flourished in Victorian Eng- 
2 a H land was Sir Lawrence Alma- 
— 2 Tadema, who in art occupies 
the field that Bulwer Lytton does in liter- 
ature, in so successfully creating a picture 
of ancient civilization that it has not been 
surpassed by his followers. Alma-Tadema 





of worship, of the sacrifices and of the 
festal processions. There was no monu- 
ment of brass or marble, no wall painting, 
no pictured vase nor mosaic, no sample 
of ancient arts, of pottery, stone-cutting, 
or work in gold, that he did not study.” 
In 1869 he sent his painting ‘“The Pyrrhic 
Dance”’ to the Academy in London, where 
it was so well received that the painter 
decided to make his home in England. 


is credited with having solved “‘the prob- 


lem of the picture of 
antique manners in 
the most authentic 
fashion in the pro- 
vince of painting. He 
has peopled the past, 
rebuilt its towns, re- 
furnished its houses 
and rekindled the 
flame upon the sacri- 
ficial altars.’”’ In other 
words, this famous 
Dutch painter, who 
was born in Holland 
in 1836 and, settling 
in London, became 
a naturalized Eng- 
lihman in 1873, 
called to life amid 
London smoke and 


N his “Death of the Firstborn,’ Sir 

Lawrence Alma-Tadema has answered 
those critics who charge him with lacking 
sentiment, and assert that his pictures 
possess no heart-interest. Here on an 
Egyptian housetop, in the time of Moses, 
is symbolized the deep mourning into 
which Egypt was suddenly plunged when, 
“It came to pass, that at midnight the 
Lord smote all the firstborn in the land, 
from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on 
his throne unto the firstborn of the captive 
that was in the dungeon.”’ What a picture 
of grief is this mother, clasping her dead 
son on his father’s knees, while pros- 
trated about them are the mourning fam- 


Indeed, London, for 
all its grime and fog, 
offered even a more 
favorable atmosphere 
for the art of Alma- 
Tadema than did that 
of his native land. 
Contributing materi- 
ally to it were his 
home and studio sur- 
roundings, in a Pom- 
peiian house which he 
built in the English 
metropolis, with ‘“‘its 
dreamy vividarium, 
its great golden hall, 
its Egyptian decora- 
tions, its Ionic pil- 
lars, its mosaic floor, 
and its Oriental car- 


: ii ; ‘ 
fog the sacrifices of "Y retainers! 


Pompeii and Hercu- 

laneum, and leads us pictorially through 
the streets of old Athens, reconstructing 
the temples, altars and dwellings, the 
shops of the butchers, bakers and fish- 
mongers, just as they once were. 
Alma-Tadema first had the Dutch painter 
Leys for a master at the Academy of Fine 
Arts, Antwerp. He was then sixteen, and 
almost immediately exhibited a preference 
for historical painting. Encouraged by his 
preceptor, he began with early French and 
Egyptian subjects, but it was not until 
1863, when he first went to Italy, that he 
may be said to have discovered his archaeo- 
logical mission. How the old Romans 
dressed, how their armies were equipped 
and attired, became the object of his 
painstaking study, as did everything that 
might enable him to bring antiquity back 
to life in so far as it lay in the power of 
his art. 

Muther records: ‘‘He explored the ruins 
of the temples, and he grew familiar with 
the privileges of the priests, the method 


Egypt lives in the picture. 


48 


pets—everything 
_ needful to conjuring 
up the days of Nero and the Byzantine 
emperors. It was surrounded by a garden 
in the old Roman style, with a large con- 
servatory planted with plane-trees and 
cypresses. All the celebrated marble 
benches and basins, the figures of stone 
and bronze, the tiger-skins and antique 
vessels and garments of his pictures, were 
to be found in this notable house in the 
midst of London.”’ 

In their still-life his pictures are the record 
of immense archaeological Jearning which, 
with this artist, became intuitive vision, 
but his figures are the result of a healthy 
rendering of life. His drawing is generally 
pronounced good, his coloring faithful, but 
he is at times charged with a lack of 
sentiment. It is a visual pleasure of color- 
ing, intelligent grouping, fine differentia- 
tion of textures and of stuffs that his pic- 
tures afford. In his long and successful 
career Alma-Tadema was the recipient of 
many great international honors. He died 
while staying at Wiesbaden in 1912. 





THE FIRSTBORN 





BESET Es 


SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA (1836-1912) 
Exodus XII, 29 





Courtesy Current Literature Pub. Co. 





NICOLAS POUSSIN 
Roe NATOLE FRANCE relates 


that the Abbé Scarron, when 
in Rome in 1634, ‘‘met in the 
b a outskirts of the city a man 
< a few years older than him- 
self, who was already the glory of French 
art.’’ This man was Nicolas Poussin, de- 
scribed as ‘‘sober of habit, grave and 
modest, and of a sublime genius and 
simplicity.” The Abbé had a keen ap- 
preciation of art and 
contrived to pick up 
an acquaintance with 
Poussin, who, with 
his young wife, “‘lived 
as simply as any 
workman of the pe- 
riod.”’ Yet “‘he was 
always surrounded by 
a number of friends 
and fellow artists, on 
his strolls about the 
Eternal City, who 
formed a kind of es- 
cort. He was cele- 
brated for his con- 
versation, and _ his 
society was eagerly 
sought by every per- 
son of note who visited the city.” 
Walking among the ruins of the Pincian 
one day with a stranger, who was anxious 
to obtain as a souvenir some fragment of 
antiquity, Poussin said: “I will give you 
the most beautiful thing you could possibly 
desire.’’ Whereupon he picked up from the 
grass a handful of dust—remains of ce- 
ment, marble and porphyry, reduced al- 
most to powder. ‘‘Seigneur,’’ he said, 
“take this away with you; this dust is 
ancient Rome.’’ The incident was char- 
acteristic of the painter who dominated 
the art of the seventeenth century. 
Poussin was born in the Norman village 
of Villers, in 1594, of peasant parentage. 
Finding his way to Paris as a lad, he 
managed later on to go to Rome to pursue 
his studies, but ‘“‘the only living Italian 
artist from whom he condescended to 
learn was Domenichino.”’ Of their meet- 
ing it is related that when all the students 
in Rome were flocking to San Gregorio on 
the Coelian to copy ‘‘The Martyrdom of 
Saint Andrew,’’ by the then popular 
Guido Reni, the chapel adjoining where a 
Domenichino picture hung was deserted 





plates. 


MOSES is shown here smiting the rock 

in Horeb, in accordance with the 
command of the Lord and His promise 
that “‘there shall come water out of it, that 
the people may drink. And Moses did so 
in the sight of the elders of Israel.’’ 
Moses, at the left, is wielding the rod 
with which he had previously caused the 
Red Sea to spread apart, and the thirsty 
Israelites are pictured in various attitudes, 
some giving thanks to God and others 
drinking avidly from goblets, bottles and 
In the background 
Horeb and the plain in which the thirsty 
hosts of Israel are temporarily encamped. 


50 


save for one student who recognized the 
superiority of the work and was copying 
it. The student was Poussin. He drew 
the attention of other painters to the 
neglected picture, and ‘“‘presently Domeni- 
chino himself came to the chapel to see 
what manner of man it was who preferred 
his work to the popular idol. They en- 
tered into conversation, and, as a result, 
the young French painter became a pupil 
of Domenichino.”’ 

In 1639 Louis XIII 
of France wrote Pous- 
sin inviting him to 
Paris and pledging 
him one thousand 
écus a year and a 
commodious lodging 
in whichever of the 
royal palaces he pre- 
ferred, the Louvre or 
Fontainebleau. He 
was placed at the 
head of the artists 
who were decorating 
the Louvre, and 
spent more than two 
years in France be- 
fore returning to be 
‘“‘the most famous artist in Rome.”’ 

He seems to have aroused the jealous 
enmity of many artists in France, and, al- 
though he long remained ‘“‘painter to the 
King,” the Royal Minister of Public 
Works on one occasion complained that 
Poussin “‘had put more love into a picture 
of the ‘Finding of Moses,’ for the banker 
Pointel, than into ‘The Baptism’ which 
had been painted for the King.’’ Poussin 
wrote in reply, “If the picture of Moses 
found in the waters of the Nile pleased 
you so much, is it a sign that I have put 
less love into your pictures? Do you not 
see that it is the nature of the subject 
which is the cause, and that the subjects I 
paint for you must be presented in a dif- 
ferent manner?” 

Not long afterwards, in 1665, Poussin 
succumbed to a fever and was buried in 
the Roman parish church of San Lorenzo- 
in-Lucina. A simple tablet, with an epitaph 
in Latin, marked the site. The funeral is 
described as stately. By 1799, however, 
the epitaph had disappeared. Poussin 
was forgotten—at least in Rome—and the 
site of his grave was lost. 


is Mount 


MOSES STRIKES THE ROCK IN HOREB 





NICOLAS POUSSIN (1594-1665) Bridgewater House, London 
Exodus XVII, 6 


LEON GEROME 


if N the year 1847 the appear- 
ance of a young French artist 

Ni who exhibited a sensational pic- 
ture in the Paris Salon was 

: hailed by that master of critics, 
Theophile Gautier, in the memorable 
words, “Let us mark with white this 
happy year, for a painter is born to us. 
He is called Géréme. Today I tell you 
his name, and I predict that tomorrow he 


and the heroines of one or another period. 
Another critic, Gergeuet, speaks of Gé- 
rome’s “incontestable erudition as a man 
and an artist. He has innate tact and 
taste.... It may appear old fashioned to 
applaud the literary qualities in a painter, 
and to praise him for being well-informed 
regarding the subjects he treats; but 
never, since I began to look at and study 
pictures, has it been plain to me that a 


will be celebrated.” 

Even Gautier, with 
his acute perception 
and prophetic eye, 
could not have fore- 
seen and measured 
the heights to be at- 
tained by the then 
twenty -three-year-old 
Leon Géréme, boyish 
“chief of the neo- 
Greeks,’’or that, forty 
years later, almost 
over-burdened with 
decorations, titles and 
laurels, lavished upon 
him by many nations 
of the civilized world, 
he would be acclaimed 
the most eminent rep- 


A MALEK is Overcome by the Holding 

up of Moses’ Hands’’ illustrates the 
battle of Rephidim, as recorded in Exodus, 
in which Joshua led the hosts of Israel 
against those commanded by Amalek, 
while Moses, Aaron and Hur witnessed 
the fight from a near-by hill. It being or- 
dained that the Israelites could triumph 
only so long as Moses’ hands were up- 
raised, and “as his hands were heavy, 
they took a stone and put it under him, 
and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur 
stayed up his hands ...until the going 
down of the sun.” The scene of carnage 
in the corpse-strewn plain, with birds of 
prey flocking overhead, is very imagina- 
tively portrayed, as are the figures of 


knowledge of the sub- 
jects portrayed is 
hurtful to their exe- 
cution.”’ 

Of Géréme it has 
been said that he saw 
his pictures finished 
before he touched 
brush to canvas. His 
prevision was extraor- 
dinary. He is ever 
listening, disturbed 
and dubious at times 
in striving to hear 
perfectly the thou- 
sand murmurs that 
influence the creation 
of a masterpiece. Not 
only, observes Horace 
Vernet, was Gérdme 


resentative of high 
art of the nineteenth 
century. 

Alexandre Dumas 
writes of Géréme: ‘‘A serious talent, and 
of an elevated order; an artist who looks 
at his art nobly, and who devotes to it 
his existence— every instant, every thought. 
One breathes freely again before such 
works as his; above all, when, alas! one 
has sighed over the lowered and lowering 
standard of art ”’ 

The artistic qualities of Gér6me—painter, 
sculptor, savant and teacher—have been 
the subject of much discussion. His en- 
dowments are provocative of both praise 
and criticism. He is an Orientalist of the 
first order; he has executed great historic 
works that in themselves would make an 
artist famous; he is so learned a painter 
of the antique that a close study of this 
department of his work awakens a sense 
of amazement, in view of the knowledge 
underlying his motifs by which he intro- 
duces us in family circles and enables us 
to chat of everyday affairs with the heroes 


Moses and his aides, who are so miracu- 
lously determining the defeat of Amalek. 


52 


in accord with his 
time, but he was 
never betrayed into 
bad taste. 

In his recollections of his first year in 
Italy, studying at the French Academy at 
Rome, under Delaroche, Géréme writes 
that he “knew nothing, and therefore had 
everything to learn.’”’ But “it was already 
something to be well posted regarding 
myself, and my courage was unfailing. 
My none too robust body was strengthened 
by living and painting much in the open 
air.”’ He was tireless in making studies 
in architecture, landscapes, figures and 
animals; in a word, was ever in contact 
with nature at first hand. “I watched 
myself closely at work; and one day, hav- 
ing made a study rather easily I scraped 
it entirely from the canvas, although it 
was not badly done. It simply was not 
as good as I felt capable of doing.”’ ' 
On one occasion Géréme was reproached 
for not showing sufficient deference to the 
critics. He retorted: “I work to please 
myself first, and others afterward.” 


Courtesy Current Literature Pub. Co. 


AMALEK IS OVERCOME 


(1824-1904) 


AN LEON GEROME 


per XVII, 12 








AGNOLO BRONZINO 


T was the misfortune of Agnolo 
Tori, called Bronzino, to have 
been antedated by Michel An- 
gelo and by Andrea del Sarto. 
When Andrea died in 1531, 
“full of glory and domestic trials,’ as 
Vasari recounts, the normal development 
of Florentine painting ended, and Florence 
had already seen its artistic star dimmed 
by the rising splendors of Venice and 


he not only permitted Bronzino to watch 
him work, but often, as his talent devel- 
oped, permitted him to collaborate on a 
picture.”’ 

Thus Bronzino lived in a state of tutelage, 
often in a condition that approached 
penury. His first pictures, so far as 
known to be in existence, were a Pieta 
and a San Lorenzo—now much altered by 
retouching—painted in conjunction with 


Rome. Artistically, Pontormo between 
it became a city of AGNOLO BRONZINO, who was among the years 1522 an 

wit and - ingenuity, the last of the great Florentine 1525. In these pic- 
chronicling and criti- tures, and other of 


cizing art rather than 
producing it. More- 
over, observes Pro- 
fessor Mather, the 
sublimity of Michel 
Angelo worked havoc 
with his _ followers. 
“Some of these have 
the grace of lucidity, 
like Agnolo Bronzino, 


painters, has not scrupled, in his “Moses 
Breaking the Tables of the Law,’ to de- 
pict Moses both in the act of receiving 
and of breaking the tablets. At the top 
of the picture he can be observed kneeling 
and receiving the tablets from the hand 
of God, while below ‘‘as soon as he came 
unto the camp he saw the calf and dancing: 
and his anger waxed hot, and he cast the 


his early paintings, 
Bronzino wanders be- 
tween the manner of 
Andrea del Sarto and 
its reflection in the 
work of Pontormo. 

Evidently the repu- 
tation of the young 
artist was growing, 
for in 1530 the Duke 


who practiced a re- 
actionary sort of por- 
traiture based on an 
old tradition of tem- 
pera painting.”’ 

As a portrait painter, 
Bronzino found con- 
genial sitters in the 
haughty  patricians 
surrounding the per- 
son of Cosimo de’ Medici, the first grand 
duke of Florence, and in the field of por- 
traiture he is nearly in the first rank. 
He was born in 1502, in the Italian vil- 
lage of Monticelli, near San Frediano. 
His father is said to have been a butcher, 
which elementary occupation did not blind 
him to the boy’s artistic bent, and Ag- 
nolo received such instruction as was 
available before eventually entering the 
studio of Jacopo Carucci, known to fame 
as Pontormo in Florence. 

In character and genius this fiery and 
capricious Pontormo seems to have been 
the exact antithesis of the gentle, submis- 
sive and studious Bronzino. Nevertheless, 
in his hermit fashion he took a great fancy 
to the lad, who became as a son to him. 
We are told that ‘“‘while the master was 
jealous of his painting to such a degree 
that he would never allow his pupils to see 
one of his pictures until it was finished, 


tables out of his hand, and brake them 
beneath the mount.’’ 
given to the women in this picture, and 
their attitudes, bespeak the gala occasion 
which is being so suddenly interrupted; 
and the protesting gestures of Aaron and 
his brethren to the breaking of the tables 
are vigorously executed. 


54 


of Urbino commis- 
sioned him to deco- 
rate his villa, near 
Pesaro. Vasari re- 
counts that while 
Bronzino was thus 
employed Pontormo 
urged him to return 
to Florence and help 
him finish the decora- 
tions of the Sala di Poggia at Cajano, and 
that since “‘Bronzino could not obtain 
leave of absence from Guidobaldo, who © 
wished to pose for a portrait in armor, 
he was obliged to meet Pontormo surrep- 
titiously and in the night.” Incidentally, 
this portrait, now in the Pitti Gallery, was 
the first noteworthy proof that Bronzino 
was a painter of genius. 

The fullest expression of his art dates 
from 1540 when he entered the service of 
Cosimo, and decorated the chapel of 
Eleanora di Toledo. This work is a re- 
sumé of all his paintings, and it was while 
engaged upon it that he painted some of 
his best portraits of the Medici family. 
Considering that Bronzino was a most 
conscientious artist the extent of his out- 
put is extraordinary. But his energy and 
the quality of his work suffered a marked 
decline, and his old age was attended with 
poverty and infirmities. He died in 1572. 


The prominence 


MOSES SMASHES THE TABLES OF THE LAW 





BRONZINO (1502-1572) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Exodus XXXII, 19 , Royal Gallery, Dresden 


EDWIN A. ABBEY 


4a SINGER SARGENT, of 
whom we write elsewhere, was 
awarded his commission to 
decorate a section of the Bos- 
ton Public Library at the same 
time that contracts to decorate other sec- 
tions of the edifice were made with Puvis 
de Chavannes and Edwin Austin Abbey. 
The French painter, Chavannes, was the 
first of the trio to get his staging up and 
the first to get it 





gave him a letter of introduction to the 
art director of Harper’s Weekly. 
Thus, at nineteen, we find Abbey in New 
York helping to illustrate the leading 
American weekly periodical of the time. 
Its files from 1872 to 1890 contain a record 
of the gradual evolution of the art of 
Abbey. At first his salary was seven dol- 
lars a week, which was increased to ten 
dollars a week at the end of five years. 
At twenty-six Abbey 
receivedshis first im- 


down. Sargent’s 
‘“‘Prophets” by no 
means cover the 


. spaceassigned to him; 
and when asked once 
when he would com- 
plete the task, he re- 
plied, ‘‘Never, unless 
I learn to paint bet- 
ter than I do now— 
Abbey has discour- 
aged me!’’ As for 
Abbey and his great 
murals in the Boston 
Library, it is signifi- 
cant that the artist 
himself was not 
wholly pleased with 
them. ‘‘Give me a 
little time,’’ he is re- 
ported to have said 
while engaged on the 
work, ‘“‘and I’ll do 


A™ ONG the comparatively few pictures 

of Biblical subjects done by Edwin A. 
Abbey, this one illustrating ‘‘The Strata- 
gem of Gideon’ is rated most highly. It 
was inspired by Judges VII, 20: “And 
the three companies blew the trumpets, 
and brake the pitchers, and held the 
lamps in their left hands, and the trum- 
pets in their right hands.”’ It will be ob- 
served that the artist has taken some 
liberties with the text, in that several of 
the trumpeters are holding the lamps and 
trumpets in reverse order to that stated 
scripturally. As a portrayal of martial ani- 
mation, this picture 1s a last word in illus- 
tration. It, of course, portrays the three 
hundred desperate followers of Gideon 
who, by a ruse of divine dictation, con- 
fused and routed the mighty host of 
Midian, as promised by Jehovah. 


portant commission 
to illustrate a de luxe 
edition of the poems 
of Robert Herrick, 
and was sent to Eng- 
land to do it. At the 
end of two years 
Abbey returned to 
America with more 
than enough sketches 
to illustrate the vol- 
ume, and remained 
long enough to see it 
published. Then he 
returned to England 
and made his home 
there for the rest of 
his life. His Glouces- 
tershire studio, forty 
feet wide by seventy- 
five feet long and 


something worth 

while with my subject of the Holy Grail.” 
This distinguished American painter was 
born in Philadelphia on April 1, 1852. 
As a schoolboy he was remiss and back- 
ward in his studies; fonder of drawing 
pictures than of wrestling with the three 
R’s. At the same time his parents were 
ambitious for him to be a lawyer; but 
the boy continued to draw pictures be- 
cause he wanted to. As a result the elder 
Abbeys gave up the idea of having a lawyer 
in the family, and decided that if Edwin 
became a good printer it would be enough. 
A position was found for him in the type- 
setting department of a Philadelphia news- 
paper published by George W. Childs. 
Evenings and a daylight hour three times 
a week he sketched in the free class of the 
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and 
in the course of time his sketches at- 
tracted the attention of his employer, who 


56 


twenty feet high, as 
described by Elbert 
Hubbard, was ‘‘a royal workshop such 
as Michel Angelo might have used for 
equestrian statues, or cartoons to decorate . 
a palace for the Pope. Dozens of pictures, 
large and small, were generally upon the 
easels. Arms, armor, furniture were all 
about, while on the shelves were vases and 
old china enough to start a museum. In . 
chests and wardrobes were velvets, bro- 
cades and antique stuffs and costumes, all 
labeled, numbered and catalogued.”’ 

This largest private studio in England 


,was built especially to accommodate the 


paintings for the Boston Public Library, 
which cover over a thousand square feet of 
space, and form ‘‘quite the noblest speci- 
men of mural decoration in America.” 
Abbey married Mary Gertrude Mead of 
New York in 1890, the year his first 
picture was accepted by the British 
Academy. 


THE STRATAGEM OF GIDEON 





SEN 


EDWIN AUSTIN ABBEY (1852-1911) Courtesy Current Literature Pub. Co. 
Judges VII, 20 


JEAN PAUL LAURENS 





of his ambition, his art is its own justifi- 
cation. 

Laurens was born at Fourquevaux in the 
Haute-Garonne. He was a pupil of the 
Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Toulouse, and 
then in Paris of Cogniet and Bida. He 
is said to have travelled over the French 
Alpine provinces in his youth with a band 
of young painters, whose primitive means 
of locomotion was a donkey-drawn cart, 


AKING the text “... And behold his 

daughter came out to meet him with 
timbrels and with dances,’”’ Laurens, in 
his “Jephthah’s Daughter,’ has painted 
a scriptural picture of vision and anima- 
tion. Jephthah, as captain of the hosts 
of Israel, had vowed unto the Lord that, 
if his army defeated that of Ammon, he, 
on his return home, would offer up for a 
burnt offering “whatsoever cometh forth 
of the doors of my house to meet me.” 
Success crowned his arms, and this pic- 


paying their way by 
painting rude pictures 
in the little churches 
along the way. 

In 1863 Laurens ex- 


‘hibited at the Paris 


Salon a picture of the 
“Death of Cato,’ fol- 
lowed the next year 
by the. “Death: of 
Tiberius,’’ and some 
six years later by his 
“Supper of Beau- 
caire’’ which was his 


C= SMONG modern French paint- 
ers Jean Paul Laurens, who 
was born in 1838, may be 
b E\ 3 characterized as a sort of 
<a artistic son-in-law of Dela- 
croix, who was forty years his senior. 
But whereas Delacroix irritated people by 
his violence of composition, by his ar- 
rangement of figures with a view to pathos 
at the expense of naturalness, and the 
frequent incomplete- 
ness of his works, 
which were regarded 
as sketches, not fin- 
ished paintings, Lau- 
rens was always a 
finished and accurate 
painter. 
Surnamed by his 
comrades “the Bene- 
dictine,’’ because of 
his fondness for 
themes from ecclesi- 
astical history, Lau- 
rens belonged to a 
group of French his- 
torical painters whose 
theory was that a 
picture should repre- 
sent an historical fact 
with absolute faithfulness. He was far 
more vigorous and essentially masculine 
than Delaroche. His personages, as Pro- 
fessor Muther points out, are truer to 
nature, are less banal; the general effect 
is warmer and more vital; he has a greater 
power of attracting attention. There is no 
cold pedantry about his work; the art of 
combination is adroit, and frequently be- 
trays a grim earnestness. Laurens really 
loved the terrible, while many of his 
contemporaries merely made use of it for 
the manufacture of what are nothing more 
than tableaux. To the Inquisition espe- 
cially was he indebted for many notable 
canvases, and at times he was able to 
portray its darker aspects with very subtle 
but tremendous effectiveness. When he 
heaps up, in front of a church, corpses to 
which burial has been refused; when he 
disinters princes of the church in order to 
place them on the stand before their ac- 
cusers; when he opens coffins to reveal the 
death-blasted features of some erstwhile 
lovely girl, he sets even the dullest nerves 
on edge; and as he therein attained the goal 


ture shows the doomed maiden, idolized 
by him, dancing forth to meet her victori- 
ous father, who can be seen through the 
window riding at the head of his soldiers. 


58 


first considerable suc- 
cess. Early in the 
70’s on the opening 
day of the Salon, stu- 
dents were comment- 
ing on the pictures 
when one from the Atélier Bonnat said, 
“Have you seen the Robert the Pious? 
It is an innovation.’”’ A short time after- 
ward the picture in question, the “Ex- 
communication of King Robert the Pious, 
1004,’ having won the applause of Paris, 
was bought by the French Government 
and placed in the Luxembourg. 

The fondness of Laurens for mortuary 
subjects may have had its origin in his 
technical capacity and technical limita- 
tions, as well as in his mental bias. In this 
connection, E. H. Blashfield makes the 
interesting observation that “in his can- 
vases Laurens admits no movement... 
his finely drawn and admirably character- 
ized people sit or stand still; they do not 
move.” Probing for the secret of their 
impressiveness, this critic traces it to the 
manner in which Laurens observes the 
first law of composition, that of filled and 
empty spaces. ‘‘He never had to be taught 
that where certain portions of a picture are 
rich and crowded, other portions must be 
simple, in order that there may be spaces 
which shall rest the eye.”’ 


JEPHTHA’S DAUGHTER 





Courtesy Current Literature Pub. Co. 


) 


JEAN PAUL LAURENS (1838- 


Judges XI, 34 


LEON BONNAT 


§ EON BONNAT had his day, 
saw it fade away, and is due 

Pai to have it dawn again. This 

Ws] eminent French artist, most 


distinguished perhaps as a 
portrait painter, was seventeen years of 
age when he put aside his boyish ambition 
to be a sailor in order to become a painter. 
Doubtless his early seafaring disposition 
was due to his birthplace and environ- 


of the Prix de Rome; on the contrary, he 
satisfied himself with painting scenes from 
the varied and colorful lives of the Roman 
people. It was at this period that he was 
first attracted to Biblical subjects, and to 
it are attributed such religious pictures as 
“The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew,” “Saint 
Vincent de Paul,’’ and the realistic and 
striking ‘“‘Job’’ of the Luxembourg. 

All these pictures showed steady progress. 


ment, Bayonne, 
France, where he was 
born in 1833 and 
spent his childhood. 
Fortunately for his 
artistic future, his 
father failed in busi- 
ness, when the lad 
was fourteen, and re- 
moved to Madrid. 
There he remained 
seven years, and took 
the boy frequently 
through the Museum 
of the Prado, where 
young Bonnat devel- 
oped an adoration for 
Velasquez, and coin- 
cidentally decided to 
be a painter himself. 
For a time in Madrid 


BONNAT'S Spirited painting, “The 

Youth of Samson,” shares with a 
great many of his portraits an astonishing 
power of characterization and realism. 
He builds up his figures with the plastic 
sense of a sculptor, giving them the pro- 
jection of life itself. This picture refers 
to the journey Samson took to the Philis- 
tine town of Timnath in quest of a wife, 
and when a young lion crossed his path, 
“the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon 
him, and he rent him as he would have 
rent a kid, and he had nothing in his 
hand.” The artist is particular to accentu- 
ate Samson’s hair, the saurce of his great 
strength, by making it luxuriant and re- 
belliously confined under two strands of 


Bonnat displayed a 
special virtuosity in 
conjuring onto the 
canvas visages fur- 
rowed by the toil and 
tempest of life—gray 
hair, waving gray 
beards, and the start- 
ing sinews and mus- 
cles of venerable 
weather-beaten folk. 
In the early seventies, 
in painting a Cruci- 
fixion for the jury- 
chamber in the Paris 
Palais de Justice, 
he executed a virile 


figure, the muscles 
and anatomy of which 
are as “clearly 


_marked as the but- 


he studied under Ma- 
drazo, and profited 
greatly in his forma- 
tive, impressionable years by the teaching 
of that Spanish master. 

Returning to France, and naturally pro- 
ceeding to Paris, Bonnat entered the 
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and was assigned 
to the studio of Léon Cogniet. He still 
remained faithful to the teaching of Ma- 
drazo, however, and did much to estab- 
lish the profitable connection between 
French painting and that of the old 
Spaniards. By this, observes Muther, a 
large quantity of the fresh blood of natu- 
ralism was poured into French art once 
more. 2 

After four years at the Ecole des Beaux- 
Arts, practically all of them being spent 
with Cogniet, Bonnat went to Italy, where 
he was met and received as a painter of 
accomplishment. Even at that time, his 
individuality was so pronounced that he 
was not tempted to waste himself on large 
academical compositions like the holders 


heavy cord or rope. 
picture is beyond criticism. 


60 


Anatomically this ° tresses in a Gothic 


cathedral.... As in 
the paintings of Ca- 
ravaggio, a sharp, glaring light falls upon 
certain parts of the body, while others re- 
main dark and colorless in background.”’ 
His models of painting, however, were 
those of Velasquez and Ribera. The deep 
shadows and strong lights of the latter are 
often recalled by Bonnat’s vigorous method 
of painting. It was his practice, in pro- 
ducing a portrait, to light the sitter viv- 
idly, and to relieve him by the simplest 
of backgrounds, usually dark, thus isolat- 
ing the subject so that nothing would be 
in proximity to disturb the effect of con- 
centrated light upon him. 

A French Lenbach, or one might even say 
a French Sargent of a rugged sort, Bonnat 
painted a gallery of celebrated men. More 
than two hundred persons, a great many 
of them celebrities, sat to him and he has 
“painted them with an exceedingly intelli- 


gent power, masculine taste, and a learning 


which never loses itself in detail.”’ 


THE YOUTH OF SAMSON 





LEON BONNAT (1833-1922) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Judges XIV, 6 4 


ANDREA MANTEGNA 


Pah NDREA MANTEGNA was 
of obscure origin, all that is 
faeces known of his early 
years being that he went to 
Padua when very young, was 





hae 


adopted = the painter Squarcione, and at 
the age of ten was admitted to the guild 


99 


Sposi,’’ in the Castello at Mantua, and as 
a reward Lodovico Gonzaga presented 
him with an estate upon which the painter 
was to build for himself a stately house, 
where, however, he seems never to have 
actually lived, but where it was his hope 
to be free from the annoyances he suffered 


of painters as ‘“‘Andrea, the son of Messer 


Francesco Squarcione, painter.” 
time he was twenty-three, Mantegna had 


been employed in dec- 
orating three of the 
principal churches of 
the city of his adop- 
tion, and his frescos 
in the Church of the 
Eremitani, together 
with the six cele- 
brated wall-paintings 
which remain of his 
works there, are a 
priceless record of his 
early art. 

While thus engaged, 
Mantegna married 


By the we read, 


irascible temper, 


ANTEGNA’S “Samson and Delilah’ 

has always been admired for its com- 
position and its fine drawing. Suggesting 
the art of the engraver no less than that 
of the painter, its sharp ruggedness of 
outline bears witness to Mantegna’s being 
“the first painter to give thought to the 
construction of a picture’; that is to say, 
to substitute for a simple juxtaposition or 
a picturesque grouping of the figures an 
arrangement which had been thoroughly 
thought out as a whole. Incidentally, 
Delilah is here shown shearing the “‘seven 


from his neighbors. 
“Mantegna, 
quick to imagine slights 


“Again and again,’’ 
who was of an 


and to resent fancied 
injuries, appealed to 
his princely patron 
to redress his wrongs. 
Now it was to beg 
him to punish a 
tailor who had spoiled 
a piece of his cloth; 
now to bitterly com- 
plain of a neighbor 
who, he declared, had 
robbed his garden of 
five quinces; again, to 
beg for justice re- 
garding the boundary 


the daughter of Ja- 
copo Bellini, a rival 


of Squarcione, who 
was so_ displeased 
that, instead of ex- 


tolling his pupil as in the past, he vio- 
lently criticized his work and found fault 
with the Eremitani frescos because the 
figures resembled antique marbles. The 
fame of the frescos spread so rapidly, 
however, that before long Mantegna was 
regarded as the chief painter of Padua, 
and he was invited by Lodovico Gonzaga, 
marquis of Mantua, to enter his service 
and reside at the Mantuan court, then one 
of the most brilliant in Italy. Mantegna 
hesitated to accept the flattering invitation, 
and it was not until two years had passed, 
after repeated appeals from the marquis, 
who courteously but persistently plied 
him with letters filled with liberal prom- 
ises—fifteen ducats a month, free lodging, 
corn and wood enough for six people, and 
all travelling expenses paid—that Man- 
tegna yielded and removed to Mantua. 
From that time until his death forty- 
seven years later he remained the special 
court painter and a devoted retainer of 
the Gonzaga family. 

In 1474 Mantegna finished his famous 
frescos, known as the ‘Camera degli 


locks of his head,’”’ whereas, scripturally, 
“‘she called for a man, and she caused him 
to shave off the seven locks of his head.’’ 


62 


line between his es- 
tate and the next. 
To all appeals from 
his testy painter Lo- 
dovico turned a pa- 
tient ear, adjusting matters to Man- 
tegna’s satisfaction whenever possible, 
though sometimes forced to decide against 
the irritable artist, who on one occasion 
soundly thrashed an engraver whom he-sus- 
pected of having stolen his plates. This 
time a lawsuit followed in which Mantegna 
fared badly, for we find him again appealing 
to the marquis for help.’’ 

Mantegna went to Rome, in 1488, to 
decorate a chapel in the Vatican, and we 
find him complaining in a letter to the 
marquis of Mantua that Pope Innocent 
VIII, though gracious, was not generous, 
for “I have been obliged to work for a 
year with nothing in return but my 
board.”’ This statement is corroborated 
by Ridolfi who relates that the painter, 
being bidden to portray the seven deadly 
sins, placed beside them an eighth figure, 
and that when the holy father asked an 
explanation Mantegna replied, ‘‘Ingrati- 
tude.’”’ To which the Pope rejoined, smil- 
ing, “‘On this side then paint the seven 
virtues, and for an eighth figure add 
‘Patience. +77 


SAMSON AND DELILAH 





London 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
National Gallery, 


ANDREA MANTEGNA (1431-1506) 


Judges XVI, 19 


GUSTAVE DORE 


USTAVE DORE drew pic- 
tures because he had to—or 
starve. He drew them so well, 
or ill, as some of his detract- 
ors would prefer to say, that 

he became a millionaire at forty, and died 

of a broken heart at fifty. He seldom or 
never used a model; could not sketch 
from Nature; accepted advice from no- 
body; never retouched or considered his 
work after it was 
done; produced over 
a hundred thousand 


/y 


[NX this picture there is evidence of the 
painstaking care Doré took in every de- 


Parisian sketches in which he represented 
with an incisive pencil the opera, the 
Théatre des Italiens, the circus, the 
Odéon and the Jardin des Plantes. There- 
after he was engaged entirely with his- 
torical, mythological and Biblical subjects. 
As Muther says, ‘‘He turned away from 
his own age as well as from caricature, 
and made excursions into all zones and all 
periods. He visited the Inferno with 
Dante, lingered in 
Palestine with the 
patriarchs of the Old 


pictures—an average 
of six a day—was 
knighted, flattered, 
enriched, adored, 
scoffed at and pro- 
claimed the _ great- 
est illustrator of the 
Bible that ever lived. 
An Alsatian by birth, 
and a Parisian by en- 
vironment, Gustave 
Doré is spoken of as 


tail of his drawing. The magnitude of the 
house is not exaggerated, as read Judges 
XVII, 27-30: “There were upon the roof 
about three thousand men and women.... 
And Samson bowed himself with all his 
might; and the house fell upon the lords, 
and upon all the people that were therein.”’ 
This is one of his forty Bible pictures that 
were done for.exhibition in London and 
became famous as the “Doré Gallery.” 


Testament, and ran 
through the world of 
wonders with Per- 
rault. The facility of 
his invention was as- 
tonishing, and so, too, 
was the aptness with 
which he seized for 
illustration on the 
most vivid scenes 
from all authors.’’ 

Meanwhile Doréillus- 


of the French school, 

but if ever an artist belonged to no “‘school”’ 
it was this one. Gustave was the second 
of three sons and he appears to have 
frequently accompanied his father up and 
down the Rhine until “the lad came to 
know each wild crag, and crowning fort- 
ress, and bend in the river where strong 
men with spears and bows and arrows 
used to lie in wait. In imagination Gustave 
repeopled the ruins and filled the weird 
forests with curious, haunting shapes. The 
folklore of the storied river filled the 
dreams of this curious boy.”’ 

The extravagant imaginings of the future 
artist at first were amusing to his parents, 
but as time went on and he still imagined 
outlandish things and made pictures of 
them, his father was distressed and sought 
by bribes and ridicule to get Gustave to 
quit scrawling with pencil and turn his 
attention to studies in engineering; but 
with only partial success. His precocity 
is evidenced by the existence of many 
drawings and sketches that he made at the 
age of five, and by a book, ‘“‘The Brilliant 
Adventures of ‘Fouilloux’,’’ which he illus- 
trated when eight years old. His first 
drawings of artistic importance date from 
1844. 

Early in his career Doré did a series of 


64 


trated serial after 
serial with ease and surety, from the be- 
ginning giving to every picture, as Elbert 
Hubbard observes, ‘‘a wildness and weird- 
ness and awful comicality.”” This work 
was unlike anything ever before seen in 
Paris, or for that matter, in the world. 
Everyone was saying, ‘‘What next!” and 
to add to the interest, Philipon wrote 
articles for various publications concerning 
“the artistic prodigy”’ in his employ. 
Says Hubbard: ‘‘The background of every 
good Doré picture is a deep wood or 
mountain pass or dark ravine. ‘The wild 
romantic passes of the Vosges, and the 
sullen crags, topped with dark mazes of 
wilderness, were ever in his mind, just as 
he saw them yesterday when he went up 
and down the Rhine with his father.” 
And his tracery of bark and branch, and 
drooping bough held down with weight of 
dew, are strangely true to life. The great 
roots of giant trees, denuded by storm and 
flood, lie stripped before the eye: and deep 
vistas are given of shadowy glade and 
tumbling mountain torrent. All in these 
extraordinary pictures by Gustave Doré is 
somber, terrible, and tells of forces capable 
of tossing mountain peaks like bowls, and 
of a power immense, immeasurable, in- 
comprehensible, eternal in the heavens. 


a” WY MY iy fi tas Gp. 
ek “a a jj Ly MWe Gi RUB RTO 
Uy 


Liye 


ipeueeltiill 
inet Ultatd 





i 
: i 


LUN Auy 


fy 


‘ mn il i 




























































































































































































AN AN l | 


: 















































at 


PAUL GUSTAVE DORE (1833-1883) From the engraving on wood 
Judges XVI, 30 


PHILIP _ HERMOGENES CALDERON 


N 1851, recounts Henry Stacy 
Marks, the English painter, ‘‘I 
was making a drawing from an 
antique figure in the British 
Museum, when a young man 
with a bright, intelligent face, dark eyes 
and a slight black mustache, looked over 
my shoulder for a minute or two and 
then addressed me in French. I had not 
long returned from Paris, which indeed 


paratively small numbers of pictures its 
members seem to have painted and ex- 
hibited. Calderon was more prolific than 
Walker, of whom Dr. Muther says, “‘fifty 
per cent. of the English pictures in every 
exhibition would perhaps never have been 
painted if he had not been born. A national 
element long renounced, that old English 
sentiment which once inspired the land- 
scapes of Gainsborough and the scenes of 


must have been per- 
ceived by that quick- 
witted youth of seven- 
teen. We entered into 
conversation and dis- 
covered a community 
of artistic interest; 
also that we both 
lived in St. John’s 
Wood. In a _ short 
time we became fast 
friends, and on my 
next trip to Paris he 
accompanied me, and 
for a year studied 
under Picot.’”’ The 
young man in ques- 
tion was Philip Her- 
mogenes Calderon, a 
descendant of the 
great Spanish drama- 
tist, and himself an 


N40M1, having lost her husband and 

two sons, enjoins their widows, Ruth 
and Orpah, to return to their respective 
people in the country of Moab, she herself 
planning to go back to her native land of 
Judah. Both her daughters-in-law have 
a strong affection for Naomi, but while 
“Orpah kissed her mother-in-law,” on 
parting from her, “Ruth clave unto her, 
and said, Entreat me not to leave thee, 


‘ or to return from following after thee: for 


3) 
. 


whither thou goest I will go. . . Ruth 
is here shown in the act of embracing 
Naomi, while Orpah is standing behind her 
preparatory to returning to the home of her 
parents. Accompanying Naomi into the 
land of Judah, it will be remembered 
that Ruth met and married Boaz, and 
became the great-grandmother of David. 


Morland, and was lost 
in the hands of Wilkie 
and thegenre painters, 
lived once more in the 
school of Walker. 
They adapted it to 
the age by adding 
something of the 
Tennysonian passion 
for nature. English 
art entered with them 
into a new domain, 
where musical senti- 
ment is everything, 
where one is buried in 
sweet reveries at the 
sight of a flock of 
geese driven by a 
young girl, or a la- 
borer walking behind 
his plough, or a child 
playing with pebbles 


English subject. His 

father was a teacher of Spanish literature 
in King’s College, London. 

Born at Poitiers, the home of his French 
mother, in 1833, Calderon did not really 
begin to be an artist, in a professional 
sense; until he returned to London from 
Paris and was welcomed back by a little 
band of young painters, Fred Walker 
among them, who, somewhat in the manner 
of the Pre-Raphaelites, had formed them- 
selves into a brotherhood called The Clique. 
Calderon soon became a leader of this art 
circle, by reason not only of his painting 
ability, but because of his magnetic and 
persuasive personality. Tall and pos- 
sessed of romantic appearance, he was, as 
it were, a Spanish gentleman translated 
into English. 

That Calderon had a strong influence on 
Walker and other members of The Clique 
is unquestionable; and the influence of the 
little brotherhood itself was far greater 
than might be supposed from the com- 


66 


at the seashore.” 

Successors to, or, one might say, disciples 
of the Calderon-Walker manner of painting 
have perhaps been healthier, less refined, 
not so sensitive and hyperesthetic. They 
seem, in their work, more physically robust, 
and face more squarely the sharp air of 
reality. They ao longer dissolve painting 
altogether into music and poetry, living 
more in the world at every hour, not merely 
when the sun is setting, but also when the 
prosaic daylight exposes objects in their 
material heaviness. But the tender ground- 
tone, the effort to seize nature in soft 
phases, is the same in all. The earnest, 
tender and deeply heart-felt art of The 
Clique leaders has influenced them all. 
Seven years older than Walker, Calderon 
was far more fertile. His first picture, 
“By the Waters of Babylon,’ was ex- 
hibited at the Royal Academy in 1853, 
and his canvases were exhibited there with 
more or less regularity until shortly before 
his death in 1898. 


RUTH AND NAOMI 





Courtesy Taber-Prang Art Co. 


1898) 


(1833- 


PHILIP HERMOGENES CALDERON 


Ruth I, 16 





JOSHUA REYNOLDS 





4 material advantages and have 
\ had their roads so smoothly 
paved toward success as the 
S English painter, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds. We read of him going to Lon- 
don at nineteen and finding a master who 
required $600 with a pupil, and at twenty- 
one of his taking a fine establishment and 
keeping open house in order to attract at- 
tention. So successful 
was he in this direc- 


painting for lack of patrons, one hundred 
and twenty-five persons sat for Reynolds. 
Thereafter about a hundred and fifty 
people were painted by him annually; 
yielding him a yearly income of about 
$80,000. 

Presently Reynolds bought a mansion in 
Leicester Square, and furnished it mag- 
nificently. His studio was as large as a 
ballroom and was equipped luxuriously. 
The whole English 
nobility flocked to 


tion that a portrait he 
painted of Commo- 
dore Keppel so flat- 
tered that command- 
er of the Mediterra- 
nean squadron that 
he invited the young 
painter to go for a 
cruise in his. ship. 
They sailed in 1749, 


N “The Infant Samuel,’’ Sir Joshua 

preserves both the spirit and letter of 
the text in representing the little son of 
Eli and Hannah. His expression is that 
of wonder, rather than of prayerful rever- 
ence, inasmuch as he was not conscious 
that the Lord was addressing him, think- 
ing the voice to be that of Eli. At the 
same time, the child has his hands 


him. For forty years 
onwards from 1752 it 
was considered the 
proper thing to be 
painted by Reynolds, 
and he is estimated 
to have done between 
two and three thou- 
sand portraits. 

Muther observes that 


and Reynolds spent : 
three years in Italy. 
His first impression 
of the great Italian masters was, strangely 
enough, one of extreme disappointment. 
Where was that rich coloring in the Re- 
naissance classics that he had been led to 
expect from the English mezzotints? The 
Vatican glories of art were simply over- 
estimated, in his youthful opinion. Raphael, 
in particular, impressed him as being a 
mediocre painter, whom only a remarkable 
combination of circumstances had made 
famous. Surrounded by the great master- 
pieces of the fifteenth century, he contented 
himself with drawing caricatures, and made 
a sort of travesty of the “‘School of Athens’”’ 
by caricaturing the English colony in 
Rome at that time, in the attitudes of 
figures in the pictures of Raphael. But 
he very speedily changed his opinion, and 
soon was an admiring student of the 
great dead. For Titian, in particular, he 
had an extravagant devotion, professing a 
willingness to ruin himself if he might only 
possess one of his great works. 

Returning to England at the age of thirty, 
Reynolds brought with him a number of 
canvases that caused a furore in London 
art circles, where he was hailed as a new 
Van Dyck. With the portrait of the 
Duchess of Hamilton, exhibited in 1753, 
his vogue was established, and at a time 
when Hogarth had to give up portrait 


pressed together, indicating a subcon- 
sciousness of a high and holy happening. 


68 


“Only an incredible 
industry, enabling 
him year after year to 
paint with the facility and regularity of 
Rubens, made it possible to complete, ex- 
clusive of portraits, quite a number of 
religious and mythological pictures, of 
which he himself was especially proud. 
He painted with great speed and dex- 
terity, rose early, breakfasted at nine 
o’clock, was in his studio punctually at 
ten; and there till eleven he worked on 
pictures that had been commenced. On 
the stroke of eleven the first sitter ar- 
rived, succeeded by another an hour later. 
Thus he painted till four o’clock, after 
which hour he belonged to the social 
world.” 

Critical opinion today is that there is no 
striking originality in the work of this 
most celebrated English portrait painter. 
His composition and brushwork are ad- 
mirable, but his drawing, especially of the 
limbs, is often faulty. The strong point 
of his paintings is their color, showing the 
influence of Titian. 

Sir Joshua died in his great London house 
on February 23, 1792; and after lying in 
state at the Royal Academy, of which he 
was the first president, his body was 
placed in the crypt of St. Paul’s. His 
pictures left unfinished brought at auction 
nearly $200,000 and his estate was esti- 
mated at half a million dollars. 


THE INFANT SAMUEL 





SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS (1723-1792) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
I Samuel II, 18 Montpellier, France 


JACOB VAN OOST 


Bo CONTEMPORARY of Hals 
and Rembrandt, Jacob van 
Oost, called the Elder, was a 
Dutch painter of the seven- 
teenth century who is said 





EG 


never to have painted a mediocre picture 


in a long life of production. Whereas 
Hals expressed the gallantry of Holland 
in action, just as Rembrandt reflected the 
depth of Dutch philosophy, van Oost, the 


possessed seventeen, while even Rem- 
brandt in spite of his financial diffi- 
culties managed to collect and retain eight. 
Van Oost and his Flemish contemporaries 
were preoccupied with rendering the man- 
ners of their time. This characteristic, 
which gives their work a lasting historical 
value, has caused their pictures of court- 
yards, interiors, tavern scenes, conversa- 
tions, toilet-scenes, and the like to be 


Elder, while possess- 
ing rare skill and in- 
telligence, displays no 


dashing action, no 
heroic quality, no 
transcendence. He 


was born at Bruges in 
the year 1600, and 
first studied under his 
brother, Frans van 
Oost. The family 
appears to have been 
both an old ‘and 
wealthy one and no 
expense was spared on 
the education of the 
artist. On the death 
of his brother in 1623, 
Jacob van Oost de- 


I T is characteristic of the Flemish master, 

van Oost, to have imbued his picture 
of “David and Goliath” with a certain 
“noble elegance,” despite the repellent 
subject. The artist has observed scrip- 
ture to the letter in illustrating the words 
of Samuel, “And David ... smote the 
Philistine in his forehead, that the stone 
sunk into his forehead.”’ Thereon, “David 
ran and stood upon the Philistine, and 
took his sword and slew him, and cut off 
his -head therewith.”” The size of the 
sword, as pictured, is borne out by the 
Biblical text which states that Goliath, the 
Philistine champion, was “six cubits and 
a span’ in height, and “‘his spear’s head 


known as ‘‘genre’’ 
painting, from that 
French word meaning 
manner or style. A 
few, like van Oost and 
Terborch, depict the 
manner of dress and 
living of the upper 
classes; others do the 
same for the middle 
classes, and still more 
concern themselves 
with the manners of 
the peasants and 
lower classes. In 
addition to his genre, 
historical and portrait 
painting, van Oost 
painted many relig- 


cided to go to Italy 
and study the Italian 
masters, especially Annibale Carracci, the 
Bolognese eclectic, who exercised a lasting 
influence on his work. So thoroughly did 
he absorb the spirit of Carracci and copy 
his style that experts have been deceived 
into mistaking canvases of van Oost to be 
the work of the Bolognese master whose 
frescos in the Farnese palace taught 
Charles Le Brun the way to decorate the 
Louvre and the Palace of Versailles. 

In 1629 van Oost returned to his nativé 
city of Bruges and there established him- 
self as a painter. He was also a finished 
musician and a remarkable linguist. In 
the following year he married, and in 1637 
was born his artist son, Jacob van Oost, 
the Younger. 

Van Oost, the Elder, enjoyed the respect 
and friendship of many great contemporary 
Dutch painters such as Brouwer, Gerard 
Dou, Terborch and Peter de Hooch. For 
Brouwer, van Oost echoes the praises of 
Reubens and Rembrandt. He is said to 
have owned more than twenty of Brouwer’s 
pictures, of which, incidentally, Rubens 


weighed six hundred shekels of iron.’ 


70 


ious subjects, and the 
Flemish guilds and 
industrial corporations kept him well sup- 
plied with commissions. 

His son, also a painter of genius, after 
studying with his father in Bruges, spent 
several years in Italy studying the old 
masters. On one occasion, while travelling 
from Flanders to Florence, he passed 
through Paris and, instead of spending a 
night there, as he had intended, he re- 
mained two years. The sojourn had the 
effect of prejudicing him against Bruges, 
and despite the efforts of his parents to 
keep him in Flanders, he soon returned 
to France with the intention of taking a 
studio in Paris. On his way thither, how- 
ever, he took such a fancy to the town of 
Lille that he changed his mind about 
Paris and found in Lille both a home and 
a wife. He lived there for more than 
forty years, and only after losing his wife 
did he return to Bruges, where he died in 
1713. His pictures, most of which are to 
be seen at Lille, have so great a resemblance 
to those of his father that it i difficult to 
tell them apart 


DAVID WITH THE HEAD OF GOLIATH 





JACOB VAN OOST (1637-1713) 
Samuel 


DOMENICHINO 


that about 1625-6, when all the art stu- 
dents in Rome were flocking to San 
Gregario on the Coelian to copy the new- 
est masterpiece of the then popular Guido 
Reni, the chapel adjoining, where there 
hung a painting by Domenichino, was 
deserted save for one student who recog- 
nized the superiority of the work, and set 
his easel up in front of it. The student was 
young Poussin, newly come to Rome to 


PROOF that Domenichino delighted in 

painting scenes of violent contrast is 
to be had by comparing this idyllic repre- 
sentation, “David as King,” to his some- 
what horrible “‘Martyrdom of St. Agnes,” 
in the Gallery of Bologna. Himself a 
chronic victim of misfortune, the gentle, 
long-suffering spirit of the painter is in 
the face of David as he finds solace and 
abstraction in his harp-playing. The pres- 
ence of the two children, one holding an 
open music book before the king, and the 
other penning a song-score in a second 
book, are happy pictorial thoughts, as is 
the serene stretch of landscape seen 
through the open window. Distinguishing 
this painting is its great clarity both of 
figure construction and composition—a 
quality that also distinguishes many other 
works of this martyr to his art. 


perfect his art. He 
drew the attention of 
others to the neg- 
lected picture, and his 
enthusiasm seems to 
have been communi- 
cated to Domeni- 
chino, who visited the 
chapel one day to 
watch the student 
copying his’ work. 
They fell into con- 
versation, with the re- 
sult that Poussin be- 
came a pupil of Do- 
menichino. 

Some discredit this 
story, and maintain 
that the two artists 


were introduced by 


Cardinal Barberini, 
and that the sym- 
pathy felt by Poussin 
for Domenichino, who 


rT YF the disciples of the Carracci 
and early seventeenth cen- 
turies, Domenico Zampieri, 

of his shortness and corpulence, is by far 

the most important and serious figure, 

because of his influence on his contempo- 

raries and on successive artists, such as 

Nicolas Poussin. As 

Sir William Orpen 

of the Italian Re- 

naissance period, “We 

Michel Angelo and 

Leonardo da Vinci as 

school of painters; 

but our forefathers 

gard them as the 

beginning of a great 

cessors, men _ like 

Annibale Carracci 

nichino (1581-1641) 

and Carlo Maratti 

one time esteemed as 

far greater masters 

Commenting on dZampieri’s nickname, 

“‘Bue,’’ meaning the Ox, Professor Mather 

the ox amid the febrile sprightliness of the 

Catholic Reaction. His gravity is marked 

old decorative conventions of the Renais- 

sance and works in olive and silvery tones 

coolness and freshness of nature. Above 

all, Domenichino is not facile like most of 

and considerate. At times he yields to the 

prevailing sentimentality, but usually he is 

dom insists, but candidly lets the picture 

be seen.”’ 

nichino and Poussin, Esther Sutro, in her 

study of the French painter, tells of his 


in Italy, in the late sixteenth 
EN Zee called Domenichino because 
not only because of his own work, but 
the French master, 
observes, in a survey 
look upon Raphael, 
the end of a great 
were inclined to re- 
school. Their suc- 
(1560-1609), Dome- 
(1625-1713), were at 
than they are today.”’ 
observes that “it took character to play 
also in his color work. He forsakes the 
which suggest in a generalizing way the 
his contemporaries, but studious, dilatory 
- both spontaneous and reticent. He sel- 
Apropos of the relations between Dome- 
meeting with Domenichino. It seems 


te 


was plagued with mis- 
fortunes, accounted for the friendship 
that sprang up between them. These 
misfortunes seem to have consisted of the 
enmity of some of his contemporaries. 
As though his tribulations in Rome were 
not severe enough, an ill fate led Domeni- 
chino to take up a residence in Naples 
about the year 1640, with the idea of 
establishing a school. This idea was 
anything but popular with certain Neapol- 
itan painters, who soon broke the 
spirit of Domenichino, even turning him 
against the wife with whom he had lived 
on terms of ideal affection. “Presumably,” 
says Mather, “the barbarous Neapolitans 
would have done about the same thing to 
any visiting artist, but doubtless they turned 
the screw a bit harder upon a gentle idealist 
who brought into their realistic stews the 
afterglow of a Montagna or a Cima.”’ He 
died in 1641. 


DAVID AS KING 






pe NOH s 


DOMENICHINO (1581-1641) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
II Samuel Louvre, Paris 


FRANK DICKSEE 


more to the art manner born 
than Frank (christened Fran- 
cis Bernard) Dicksee, who 
practiced the art of draughts- 
manship before he became acquainted with 
reading, writing and arithmetic. His 
father, Thomas Francis, and his uncle, 
John Robert Dicksee, were both painters 
of considerable distinction, the latter hav- 
ing been born in the 
year that the Royal 
Academy was char- 
tered,and yet beingon 
record as an exhibitor 
at its hundred and 
thirty-seventh exhi- 
bition in 1905. The 
former, Thomas Dick- 
see, had his first pic- 
ture in the: Royal 
Academy itt 1841, and 
during the next fifty- 
five years he exhibited 
sixty-six pictures, 
prior to his death in 
1896. In fact, the 
exhibition record of 
the Dicksee family is 
remarkable and prob- 
ably unrivalled,—Thomas Dicksee, his son 
Frank, his daughter Margaret, and an 
artist nephew having shown 242 pictures 
at the Royal Academy alone, in addition 
to more than a hundred canvases at other 
London exhibitions. 

Frank Dicksee was born in _ Fitzroy 
Square, London, in 1853, his father being 
a painter of independent. means. The 
Dicksee home was the centre of an artistic 
colony and the scene of much entertaining. 
Frank Dicksee cannot remember when he 
began to draw, but his earliest essays were 
in copying book illustrations. At the age 
of sixteen his artistic inclination was so 
pronounced, as contrasted to his back- 
wardness with books, that he was removed 
from school and devoted himself entirely 
to the study of art, in association with 
his father. At the end of a year he was 
admitted as a probationer at the school of 
the Royal Academy, and a year later, in 
1871, he was granted a studentship. 
Recognition and honors came with fair 
rapidity. In 1872 he was awarded a 
silver medal for a drawing from the an- 





infant at any cost. 


THE Judgment of Solomon’’ has never 

been better illustrated than in the 
case of the two women who taxed the 
wise king’s understanding of human 
nature to determine which of them was 
the mother of the live child and which the 
mother of the dead one. 
said, Bring me a sword. . . . Divide the 
living child in two, and give half to the 
one, and half to the other.” 
man is preparing to execute the royal 
command, when the mother of the live 
child beseeches Solomon to spare the 
The false mother’s 
wry expression of defeat is one of the finest 
touches in this eloquent canvas. 


74 


tique; and three years later he trium- 
phantly carried off the gold medal with 
the first of his notable religious paintings, 
“Elijah Confronting Ahab and Jezebel in 
Naboth’s Vineyard.’’ With this picture, 
Dicksee, in 1876, made his début as an 
exhibitor at Burlington House, and it 
found a ready purchaser in a London 
publisher, who was the source of many 
subsequently lucrative commissions. 
Dicksee had previ- 
ously exhibited two 
pictures in water color 
at the Suffolk Street — 
Galleries, the first of 
which, ‘‘What Might 
Have Been,’’ exhib- 
ited in 1872, was 
bought by the late 
General Sir Pomeroy 
Colley, who lost his 
life in the famous 
charge up Majuba 
Hill. 

Dicksee attracted the 
attention of Fred- 
erick Leighton at the 
Academy school, and 
despite their disparity 
of ages, a friendship 
was begun that lasted until the death of 
Lord Leighton, the first British painter 
to be elevated to the peerage, in 1896. 
Like Leighton, Dicksee executed illustra- 
tions and has been a voluminous contribu- 
tor of pictorial work to Cassell’s, The 
Cornhill, The Graphic and other English 
periodicals. A 
Looking backward one _ surmises_ chat 
the wide popularity enjoyed by Leighton 
and his younger contemporaries, including 
Dicksee, was related to the revival of 
interest in antiquity and archaeology 
which, beginning in the reign of Queen 
Victoria, has continued undiminished to 
this day. Elected to the Royal Acad- 
emy in 1881, even his early pictures attest- 
ed his power and versatility, respectively, 
showing him apt in Biblical illustration, 
decorative design, poetic illustration and 
portraiture—qualities that were none the 
less pronounced in his fine contributions 
to a folio illustrated Bible, illustrated by 
twenty-six noted artists, and exhibited in 
1901. ‘‘The Judgment of Solomon” was 
one of the subjects. 


“And the king 


The swords- 


THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON 








SIR FRANCIS DICKSEE (1853- ) Courtesy Current Literature Publishing Co. 
I Kings III 


BENJAMIN WEST 





RIOR to the Declaration of 
Independence in 1776 there 
were neither painters nor 
—— sculptors in America. People 
a ate and drank, hewed and 
built and ploughed, and multiplied. But 
a rod of iron was esteemed of more value 
than the finest statue, and a bolt of good 
cloth was prized more highly than a can- 
The 





= 


@ 






4 


light is still standing on what is now the 
campus of Swarthmore College. 

Quaint stories are told of his youthful 
talent; how he made his own brushes, the 
family cat supplying the hair, and 
gained his first knowledge of mixing colors 
from the Indians. A Philadelphia merchant 
saw some of his juvenile sketches and sent 
the boy a complete painter’s outfit, to- 
gether with a set of engravings by Grave- 


vas by Michel Angelo or Raphael. 


rank and file of people 
were poor, and far 
too much occupied in 
making a_ livelihood 
to trouble themselves 
about problems of 
color. Moreover, art 
was frowned upon by 
the Quakers, of whom 
there was an influen- 
tial proportion in the 
original colonies. As 
Muther observes, in 
his ‘‘History of Mod- 
ern Painting,’ it was 
only when the dollar 
began to display its 
might that enterpris- 
ing portrait painters, 


N his “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba”’ 

Benjamin West executed one of his few 
undisputed pictures of the first order. His 
handling of lights and shadows is particu- 
larly effective, and betrays something of 
the chiaroscuro magic of Rembrandt, to 
whom the American painter evidently had 
given deep study. Observe how the light 
is thrown in a blaze on the Queen of 
Sheba and her attendants in the fore- 
ground, and with appropriately lessened 
intensity upon the enthroned Solomon in 
the distant background. This arrange- 
ment is the key to the Rembrandtesque 
secret of filling a great room with a living, 
breathing congregation in shadow. 


lot. Immediately up- 
on receipt of this 
windfall, Benjamin 
forgot to go to school 
one day and painteda 
picture that combined 
two of the engravings. 
Sixty-seven years la- 
ter this picture was 
exhibited in a London 
gallery along with 
West’s celebrated 
painting, “‘Christ Re- 
jected.” 

On coming of age, 
West removed to New 
York; and finally, in 
1760, he went to Italy 
to study the Renais- 


who had failed in Eu- 

rope, occasionally crossed the ocean to 
enlighten the New World with their du- 
bious art. 

Incited by these stray artists, a few young 
men of American birth cherished the am- 
bition to make painting their profession, 
but, since the early fathers were not dis- 
posed to encourage them financially, it was 
necessary for them to develop abroad. 
Thus we find Benjamin West, the first 
artist born in America, going to Europe at 
the age of twenty-one and establishing 
himself as a painter of such distinction 
as to be one of the founders of the Royal 
Academy, of which in the course of time 
he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as 
its second president. 

West was born -at Springfield, Pennsyl- 
vania, on October 10, 1738. Oddly enough, 
in view of the attitude of the Friends 
toward art, West was of Quaker parentage, 
his grandsire on the maternal side being 
intimate with William Penn. His father 
was a country merchant, and Benjamin 
was the youngest member of a large fam- 
ily. The house in which he first saw the 


76 


sance masters whose 
works are in the Vatican. 
Encouraged by Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom 
he had met in Italy, West went to Lon- 
don in 1763. His success was assured by 
a painting he did for the Archbishop 
(Drummond) of York, who obtained for 
him the royal patronage and a commission 
to decorate the royal chapel at Windsor. 
In his ‘‘Death of General Wolfe’? West 
discarded the convention of painting fig- 
ures in a modern battle clothed in Greek 
and Roman costumes, though Reynolds 
and Archbishop Drummond strove to dis- 
suade him. Sir Joshua subsequently re- 
tracted his objections and admitted West 
to be right, proclaiming the change as an 
epoch-making innovation. He produced 
more than four hundred canvases. 
In 1817 West lost his wife, with whom he 
had eloped in his Philadelphia days, with 
the assistance of Francis Hopkinson, a 
signer of the Declaration of Independence, 
William White, first Bishop of the Episco- 
pal Church in America, and Benjamin 
Franklin. In 1820 he followed her, and 
was buried in St. Paul’s, London. 


_ SOLOMON AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA 






BENJAMIN WEST (1738-1820) Worcester Art Museum 
I Kings X Worcester, Mass. 


© 


WILLIAM BLAKE 


= AM more famed in Heaven for 
my work,’’ William Blake once 
Ni wrote to a friend, “than I 
could well perceive. In my 
—_ brain are studies and chambers 
filled with books and pictures of old, 
which I wrote and painted in ages of 
eternity before my mortal life; and those 
works are the delight and study of arch- 
angels. Why, then, should I be anxious 
about the riches or 
fame of mortality?” 
This was written from 
the English seaside 
village of Felpham, 
where Blake lived 
from 1800 to 1803, 
supported mainly by 
commissions for pic- 
tures from a London 
art patron who ‘“‘went 
on nearly thirty years 
buying Blake’s water- 
colors, along with 
what the artist 
termed tempera-pic- 
tures or frescos; for 
oil, after a few ex- 
periments (dictated, 
as he said, by demons such as Titian and 
Correggio), was a vehicle which he utterly 
eschewed . . . a ‘villany’ for which he held 
Rubens or Van Dyck accountable.”’ In an- 
other letter we find Blake saying that in 
the country “I have re-collected all my 
scattered thoughts on art, and resumed by 
primitive and original way of execution in 
both painting and engraving, which, in the 
confusion of London, I had very much 
lost and obliterated from my mind.”’ 
While residing at Felpham, Blake was 
arrested for forcibly ejecting a trooper of 
the Royal Dragoons from his garden. He 
was tried on the charge of assault and 
using seditious language, but was honor- 
ably acquitted. 
Blake was the victim of many unscrupulous 
fellow artists and of dishonest dealers—also 
of hallucinations. In him imagination 
was carried to an extreme, though he was 
a visionary in the best sense. His ability 
to see that on which his thought concen- 
trated was so abnormal that often he 
could draw portraits of heroes, kings and 
bygone worthies while his friends looked 
on. One of them, a contemporary land- 


T? a visionary like Blake, the miracu- 
lous appearance of “‘a chariot of fire, 
and horses of fire’ that bore Elijah “up 
by a whirlwind into heaven, 
ticularly appealing subject to depict. His 
illustration is of Elijah and Elisha at the 
moment when the latter sees his father 
borne away, and in seeing the strange 
transference is rewarded with “a double 
portion” of his father’s spirit, Elijah hav- 
ing promised, “If thou see me when I am 
taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee.” 
The awfulness of the spectacle is indicated 
by the attitude of Elisha, whose head is 
bowed as under an insupportable vision. 


78 


frequent nocturnal visitants. 


scape-painter of merit named Varley, en- 
couraged Blake to make sketches of his 
Gilchrist re- 
cords: ‘‘Varley sitting by, awake or drows- 
ing, would say, ‘Draw me Moses,’ or 
David; or would call for a likeness of 
Julius Caesar, or Cassibellaunus, or Ed- 
ward the Third, or some other great his- 
torical personage. Blake would answer, 
‘There he is!’ And taking paper and pencil 
would begin drawing 
with the utmost alac- 
tity and composure, 
looking up from time 
to time, as though he 
had a real sitter be- 
fore him; ingenious 
Varley meanwhile 
straining wistful eyes 
into vacancy, and see- 
ing nothing, though 
he tried hard, and 
long expected to be 
rewarded by a genu- 
ine apparition.” It 
was thus Blake drew 
a ferocious figure, half 
human, half insect, 
called the Ghost of a 
Flea. When the phantasm would change 
its pose from side to full front, he drew 
the blood mouth of it on the margin, and 
when it turned back he went on drawing 
it in profile, later finishing the picture. 
The last four years of his life Blake and 
his wife passed in a small apartment in 
Fountain Court, Strand, consisting of two 
ground-floor rooms, one of which was a 
living-room for all purposes—working, 
studying, cooking, dining, sleeping. He 
seems to have been happy, though fre- 
quently his wife would place an empty 
platter before him at mealtime as a re- 
minder for him to paint something that 
would sell. 

A few days before his death, in August, 
1827, it is related, ‘‘Blake composed end 
uttered songs to his Maker, so sweetly to 
the ear of his devoted wife that he, looking 
upon her most affectionately, said, ‘My 
beloved, they are not mine! No, they are 
not mine!’’’ Just before he died, he began 
singing of the things he saw in Heaven. 
His grave in Bunhill Fields Cemetery is 
unmarked by any memorial, and cannot 
now be traced. 


+9 


was a par- 


ELIJAH AND THE FIERY CHARIOT 






MAREE a 


WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) Collection W. Graham Robertson, Esa. 
Il Kings II, 11 


THEODORE CHASSERIAU 


RIEF and brilliant was the 
"™ career of Theodore Chasseriau, 
who flashed across the heavens 
A of art like a meteor in the 
early part of the nineteenth 
century, first as a devotee of form, as 
interpreted by his master, 
afterwards, like Delacroix, as an enthusi- 
astic lover of sunshine and the clear light 





Ingres, and - 


Unfortunately his production was very 
limited, the number of canvases attrib- 
uted to him being less than a hundred. 
This was due partly to a natural indolence 
and partly to a fondness for social diver- 
sions. Personally a very elegant, blasé 
gentleman, he early plunged into the whirl- 
pool of Parisian life, and despite his re- 
markable ugliness, his black, piercing eyes 


of his native West Indies. 


born in 1819, at Sa- 
mana, on the island 
of San Domingo. His 
father was a man of 
adventurous charac- 
ter and picturesque 
career, whose later 
years were passed as 
French consul at Por- 
to Rico. At the age 
of ten Theodore an- 
nounced his desire 
and intention to be a 
painter, and a num- 
ber of his canvases are 
in existence that were 
painted before he was 
fifteen years old. At 
that age he went to 
Paris and entered the 
studio of Ingres, un- 
der whom he studied 
for two years, until 
the master was called 
to direct the Villa 


Chasseriau was 


'N this picture of “Esther preparing to 

meet King Ahasuerus’’ the creole artist, 
Chasseriau, has painted an exotic con- 
ception of Esther, the rival and successor 
to Queen Vashti in the favor of Ahasuerus. 
Vashti, having refused to wait upon the 
king, ‘“‘wearing the crown royal, to shew 
the people and the princes her beauty,” 
was banished, and among_all the maidens 
who were sought to supplant her, it was 
Esther, niece of Mordecai, upon whose 
head “‘Ahasuerus set the royal crown, and 
made her queen instead of Vashti.’”’ At 
the time it was first exhibited, at the 
Paris Salon of 1842, this small canvas 
created something of a sensation, in that 


the artist had not sufficiently idealized the. 


great beauty of the girl the Old Testa- 
ment celebrates. Its praises were elo- 
quently sung, however, by Gautier and 
Victor Hugo, and are still being sung. 


seem to have made him a boudoir favor- 


ite, and he dissipated 
his energies so rapid- 
ly that he broke down 
altogether at the age 
of thirty-six. Indeed, | 
“the amorous and 
sensual nature of 
Chasseriau led him 
into many liaisons, of 
which one was long 
and celebrated. An 
admirable sketch of 
Alice Ozy remains as 
a reminder of it.’’ 
His love of women, 
combined with an in- 
termittently intense 
application to work, 
were without doubt 
the reason for the 
premature death of 
this greatest of creole 
painters, who, after a 
brief illness, died in 
Paris, in 1857. 


Medici in Rome. 

Chasseriau seems to have been unable to 
accompany Ingres to Italy because of the 
expense. Remaining in Paris, however, he 
received early and profitable recognition, 
sending to the Salon of 1836 a ‘‘Return 
of the Prodigal Son,’’ which won a medal 
and helped to establish him as a painter 
in the French capital. Three years later 
his ‘‘Susanna,’’ now in the Louvre, was 
exhibited at: the Salon and showed Chas- 
seriau to be anything but an orthodox 
pupil of Ingres. 

‘‘He has not the least understanding of the 
ideas or the changes that have entered 
into art in our time, and knows absolutely 
nothing of the poets of recent days. Our 
ideas do not in the least correspond.” 
In these words Chasseriau has himself 
pointed out what it is that distinguishes 
him from Ingres. 


80 


Considering his in- 
fluence upon his contemporaries, notably 
Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, it is 
strange that the fame of Theodore Chas- 
seriau has not spread wider over the world. 
Of him Gautier says, ‘Other artists have 
been purer, broader, more explicit, but none 
has ever possessed a stranger fascination 
than Chasseriau.... His heads have al- 
ways a morbidly strange expression of 
nostalgic languor, a sad voluptuousness, a 
mournful smile, a mysterious gaze into in- 
finity. We have seen them in dreams of a 
far-off country, at some indefinite period of 
time, amid strange cities, or in forests of un- 
known vegetation. One would think them 
captives of another world brought into our 
civilization, clad in striped garments, 
sparkling with barbaric jewels, and re- 
sistant, like caged gazelles, with attitudes 
of wild grace.”’ 


oer 


ESTHER PREPARING TO MEET AHASUERUS 











AE SEER IS a a ay 


THEODORE CHASSERIAU (1819-1857) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Esther II, 13 Collection of Arthur Chasseriau 


WILLIAM BLAKE 


HEN a young man, William 

Blake succeeded in mas- 
tering Greek and Latin by 
himself, and although he 
declared his disapproval of 
education in general, he began to study 
Italian at the age of seventy, while he was 
at work upon his great Dante series of 
drawings. Having a mind of imagination 
all compact, he seems to have foreseen 
some of the crippled 
and deformed things 
accepted as art since 
his time. “IT see 
everything I paint in 
this world,”’ he writes, 
“but everybody does 
not see alike. To the 
eyes of a miser a 
guinea is far more 
beautiful than the 
sun, and a bag worn 
with the use of money 
has more _ beautiful 
proportions than a 
vine filled with 
grapes. The tree 
which moves some to 
tears of joy is in the 
eyes of others only a green thing which 
stands in the way. Some see Nature all 
ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall 
not regulate my proportions; and some 
scarce see Nature at all.” 

Despite the wild, yet never meaningless, 

attacks Blake made on certain artists 

(such as Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Rey- 

nolds), “‘in conversation he was anything 

but sectarian or exclusive, finding sources 
of delight throughout the whole range of 
art, while, as a critic, he was judicious 
and discriminating.” To a patron he was 
capable of writing about himself: ‘‘... The 
works I have done for you are equal to the 
Carracci or Raphael (and I am now some 
years older than Raphael was when he 
died), or else I am blind, stupid, ignorant 
and incapable.’’ Execution he once called 
the chariot of genius; and never did that 
charioteer reveal himself in more unmis- 
takable guise than in the handiwork of 

Blake. As W. M. Rossetti observes, ‘‘To 
see one of his finer tempera or water-color 

pictures, or one of his partly color-printed, 

partly hand-colored engraved designs, or 
of his designs engraved by himself on the 





and_ tribulations. 


the Naamathite. 


I N this picture Job is shown complaining 

to God, after suffering many sore trials 
“What is man that 
Thou shouldst try him every moment?” 
Present with Job at the time are, in addi- 
tion to his wife, who has vainly besought 
him to ‘“‘curse God, and die,’”’ Eliphaz the 
Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar and 
Time and again they 
have tried Job’s patience, until he ex- 
claims, ‘“‘How long will ye vex my soul, 
and break me in pieces with words?” The 
figures in this print, made in 1792, and 
measuring about 14 by 20 inches, are the 
largest that Blake ever engraved. 


ordinary system, is a new and intense 
experience.”’ 

In a prospectus which he issued in 1793 
Blake spoke of having “invented a method 
of printing both letterpress and engraving 
in a style more ornamental, uniform and 
grand than any before discovered.’’ His 
color-worked engravings have greater 
strength and depth than the water colors, 
and are in numerous instances most forcible, 
not only in idea but 
in execution. Of his 
uncolored engravings, 
the Job is in some 
points of view his — 
masterpiece. 

Next after his powers 
of imagination, awe- 
inspiring at times, 
after Blake’s 
masterly reproduc- 
tion of the human 
form, as expressive 
of energy, aspiration, 
ardor and all of the 
divine or demoniac 
in man, Rossetti 
would place the treat- 
ment of light, and 
especially of flame, as Blake’s highest dis- 
tinction in art; although “his mastery 
over color likewise, in certain vivid com- 
binations of simplicity and of intensity, is 
very marked and admirable. Clearly 
Blake ‘was born, like every other great 
artist, with the seeing eye—with the power 
to discern appearances rapidly, vividly 
and intensely, and to reproduce them at 
once if in demand, or to store them up for 
future use. Many things that he saw he 
loved, and he painted them masterfully or 
tenderly.” 

Of the difference between a bad and good 
artist, Blake himself observed that ‘‘the 
bad artist seems to copy a great deal, and 
the good one does copy a great deal.... 
Invention depends altogether upon execu- 
tion or organization. As that is right or 
wrong, so is the invention perfect or im- 
perfect. Michel Angelo’s art depends upon 
Michel Angelo’s execution altogether.” 
Blake protests that he does not condemn 
Rubens, Rembrandt or Titian because 
they did not understand drawing, but, 
strange to say, because “they did not 
understand coloring.” 





Ba 


WILLIA 
Job III, 1 


BLAKE (1757-1827) 





satis * 


Collegtion W. Graham Robertson, Esq. 


CHRISTOFANO ALLORI 


AD Christofano Allori painted 
only one picture, that of 
‘‘Judith and Holofernes,”’ he 
would still be reputed ‘“‘easily 
first among the Florentine 
artists, in his mastery of technique and 
coloring.’’ And Charles Blanc goes on to 

observe, ‘‘Allori excelled in delicacy of 

execution, but he was withheld by a certain 
fastidiousness from completing many of his 





with his work that he allowed himself to be 
influenced by palpably inferior contempo- 
raries, such as Cigoli, for instance—another 
deserter from the studio of old Alessandro— 
who went to Venice to. study Correggio, 
Baroccio and others of the Venetian school, 
and revealed to the Florentines a new lan- 
guage of color. Even through a second- 
hand acquaintance with Corregio, however, 
Allori was inspired to soften his brush-work, 


pictures.’” Less than 
twenty canvases by 
him are known to be 
in existence, and he is 
believed to have 
painted less than fifty 
pictures in his life- 
time of forty-four 
years. 

Christofano Allori 
was born at Florence 
in 1577, the son of a 
painter, Alessandro 
Allori, well known in 
his day, who, in turn, 
was a nephew of the 
old Florentine mas- 


and in copying the 

[HE event here depicted, related in the te per pe by 
frequently painted that master e for- 

ts got foreverthedry aus- 


Apocrypha, 
by the Renaissance artists. Holofernes, 
whose severed head Judith is clutching, 
had commanded an army sent against 
Palestine by the Assyrian King, Nebuchada- 
nezzar. The destruction of the temple at 
Jerusalem was imminent when Judith, 
described as a rich young widow of the 
tribe of Judah, went to the camp of Holo- 
fernes, and captivated the general by her 
great beauty. A banquet was given in her 
honor, and as Holofernes lay sleeping after 
a night of dissipation she cut off his head. 


terity of Bronzino.”’ 

Allori was a man of 
passionate nature and 
of a_pleasure-loving 
disposition. A good 
horseman, a graceful 
dancer, an accom- 
plished musician, he 
spent much time in 
social adventuresthat, 
in the interest of his 
art, might have been 


ter Bro nz tn k 

Christofano first studied under his father, 
but while still in his nonage he became 
impatient of the influence Bronzino had on 
his sire and teacher, and made the fact 
public by calling his father ‘‘a heretic in 
painting,’ to the great scandal of Ales- 
sandro. As a result Christofano became a 
pupil of Pagani, and his defection filled with 
bitterness the declining days of the elder 
Allori. The father’s death in 1607 at least 
put an end to the family quarrel, and left 
Christofano unhampered in his rebellious- 
ness against a style of painting that had 
originated with Michel Angelo, but had 
greatly degenerated in the hands of lesser 
artists. About it was a violence of pose 
that is nowhere observed in the work of 
Christofano, who, at the age of thirty, had 
already become a painter of considerable 
note in Tuscany, and was SUR as Bron- 
zino, the younger. 

Apropos of his a idinee it is related 
that when Allori was once painting a pic- 
ture of St. Francis he took for a model a 
Capuchin monk whom he made pose for six 
hours on fifteen consecutive days in order 
that one eye might be painted to the artist’s 
satisfaction. So dissatisfied was he indeed 


84 


better employed. In- 
deed, his frequent sur- 
render to such dissipations proved his 
undoing. Baldinucci relates that, becoming 
infatuated with a beautiful Florentine girl 
named Mazzafirra, Allori spent his last 
years ‘‘under the spell of this enchantress, 
whose whims were sometimes his joy but 
were more often his sorrow. Of a morning 
she would receive him with her heart on 
her lips; and that evening she would not 
so much as speak to him. Moreover, she 
was fond of luxury and costly diversions, 
and Allori’s inability to humor her in such 
matters kept him in a fever of jealousy and 
rage. ... Thinking to avenge himself 
through his art, he perpetuated the memory 
of his sorrow and his shame by painting his 
mistress as Judith and himself as Holo- 
fernes, in the greatest of his pictures.” 

Such is the story which M. Blanc questions, 
saying, ‘“‘The head of MHolofernes can 
hardly be the portrait of Allori. It is a 
mask essentially idealized and broadly 
drawn in the Florentine manner. . . . As 
for the Mazzafirra, if she was as beautiful 
as she is painted, she must have been ador- 
able; and in the presence of that paragon 
of women, victorious, resplendent, the mad 
passion of Allori is completely understood.” 


JUDITH WITH THE HEAD OF HOLOFERNES 








CHRISTOFANO ALLORI (1577-1621) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Apocrypha Pitti Gallery, Florence 


BRITON 


SJRITON RIVIERE has been 
called the greatest English ani- 
mal painter since Landseer, 
and by many he is regarded as 
superior to Landseer. Lions 
and geese, royal tigers and golden eagles, 
stags, dogs, foxes, cattle, he has painted 
them all, and with the mastery which 
betrays the presence of genius. Among 
animal painters he stands alone in his 
power of conception 
and his fine poetic 
vein, uniting in all his 





RIVIERE 


ANIEL is here shown with his back 
deliberately turned upon the lions 


Raphaelite between the ages of eighteen 
and twenty-two, and graduated from 
Oxford at twenty-seven. 

In his youth he divided his time between 
art and scholarship—painting pictures and 
studying Greek and Latin literature. Thus 
he became a painter of animals, having 
also an enthusiasm for the Greek poets, 
and he has stood for more than a generation 
as an uncontested lord and master on his 
own peculiar ground. 

Among his’ more 
intimate friends Brit- 


pictures the greatest 
simplicity with im- 
mense dramatic force. 
As Professor Muther 
says of Riviére, ‘By 
him the character of 
animals is magnifi- 
cently grasped, and 
he never forgets that 
beasts of prey are 
usually quiet and 
peaceable, only now 
and then displaying 
their savage nature. 
Moreover, he never 
attempts to represent 
animals performing a 
masquerade of hu- 
manity in their ges- 


while gazing upward toward King Darius, 
who has come to learn whether Daniel 
has survived: the night among the lions. 
The Prophet says: ‘“‘My God has sent His 
angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, 
that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as 
before Him innocency was found in me; 
and also before thee, O king, have I done 
no hurt.” How excellently the painter 
has executed these lions in their every 
movement and look! Curiously ignoring 
Daniel, their gaze is fastened upon the 
face of the king peering down into the 
den. It is early morning, and the sunlight 
streaming into the den is handled in a 
most effective manner to bring out the 
dramatic values of the picture. 


on Riviére had the 
good fortune to num- 
ber the late Dinah 
Muloch Craik and her 
husband,awell-known 
London publisher. 
While Craik was giv- 
ing the artist valu- 
able introductions, 
his wife—a popular 
novelist—had him 
employed to _ illus- 
trate her stories. In 
this way he was en- 
gaged to make the 
drawings for Ameri- 
can editions of several 
of her novels, as well 
as for numerous 


tures and expression, 

as Landseer often did, nor does he trans- 
form them into comic actors. He paints 
them for what they are, a symbol of what 
humanity was once itself, with its ele- 
mental passions and its natural virtues 
and failings.”’ 

Among animal painters Briton Riviére 
is almost alone in resisting the temptation 
to give the lion a consciousness of his own 
dignity, the tiger a consciousness of his 
own savagery, the dog a consciousness of 
his own understanding. 

Born in London in 1840, Riviére was 
descended from a French family which 
found its way into England after the 
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he 
is one of those painters—so frequent in 
English art—whose nature developed early: 
while he was still a schoolboy he drew 
and painted animals with considerable 
power; at fourteen he left school and, devot- 
ing himself to art, exhibited in the Academy 
when he was eighteen; painted as a Pre- 


86 


verses. Between 1868 
and 1871 he was a regular contributor to 
Punch. Riviére would do his illustrations 
on wood with a brush, working mostly by 
lamp light, while his wife read aloud to 


him. As a rule he employed no models. 


His style of drawing was strongly influ- 
enced by Sir John Millais. 

If his illustrative work was done in the 
evening, his painting was done entirely in 
the morning, we are told. His afternoons 
were devoted to reading and recreation. 
As an artist Briton Riviére is distinguished 
by his sympathy with animals, his sense 
of color, unerring directness of conception 
and fine vein of poetry. 

It was in 1872 that Riviére exhibited 
his great picture of ‘‘ Daniel’’ in the den of 
lions, followed six years later by ‘‘Persep- 
olis,’’ which many consider his master- 
piece, and which makes the appeal of a 
page from the philosophy of history, with 
its lions roaming majestically amid the 
moonlit ruins of a past civilization. 





| DANIEL’S ANSWER TO THE KING 





BRITON RIVIERE (1840-1920) Courtesy Taber-Prang Art Co. 
Daniel VI, 21 


JOHN SINGER SARGENT 


ITH the death in London on 
April 15, 1925, of John 
Singer Sargent it ceased to 
be possible to speak of this 
great American artist who 

was so little in America as the “only 

living old master.’’ His was an old New 

England family identified with the fishing 

port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and his 

forbears were maritime merchants and sea 





captains. Sargent 
himself was born in SARGENT, 
1856, in Florence, 


ainter 
Italy, and his early p : 


years were spent amid 


although primarily a portrait 
was capable of decorative 
work with elements of greatness in it. 


whose ailment a famous medical specialist 
had been unable to diagnose. Looking upon 
the patient in the mirror of his Sargent 
portrait the physician perceived at once 
what was the matter and predicted the 
end, which was not far off. There is an- 
other about a New England small town 
mayor who indulged the soaring ambition 
of having his portrait painted by Sargent, 
and who vaingloriously hung the canvas 
in his dining-room. 
His fellow townsmen 
came in to see—and 
laughed. They saw 
his honor as he was. 


the palaces, churches 
and galleries of that 
historic city. Later 
he studied in Ger- 
many, and at nine- 
teen he turned up, a 
shy youth, in the 
Paris atelier of Caro- 
lus Duran, the most 
fashionable painter of 
his time, with a sheaf 
of sketches which in- 
cluded work in oil, 
drawings of many 
sorts, copies of old 
masters—a _ remark- 
able record of juvenile 


His finest decorative achievement is to be 
found in the ‘‘Prophets’’ covering the 
walls of the great hall which bears his 
name in the Boston Public Library. In 
preparation for this work, he spent much 
time in study in Egypt and wherever the 
monuments and symbols of ancient re- 
ligions are to be found. The result is a 
series of representations of the progres- 
sive triumph of monotheism over the 
polytheism of the ancient world. In this 
work he utilized every device of art, even 
that of polychrome relief. The figure of 
Isaiah, in the group on the opposite page, 
is much admired for its depth of tone and 


The mortified digni- 
tary arranged with a 
burglar who provi- 
dentially came before 
him the next day as 
he sat as magistrate, 
to break into his 
house by night and 
purloin the picture. 
Of his sincerity, which 
has been no less ar- 
dently championed 
by his admirers than 
questioned by his de- 
tractors, this tale is 
told. Sargent was 
once painting a cer- 


accomplishment. 
Duran pronounced 
them good—and Sargent became so as- 
siduously his pupil that in 1877 he ex- 
hibited in the Salon a portrait of the 
master in which the master was outdone. 
Amazing as was his youthful facility, his 
youthful industry was likewise prodigious. 
From Paris Sargent went to Spain and 
fell under the influence of Velasquez—an 
influence from which he never entirely 
escaped. Returning to the French capital 
he at once began to make a stir, winning 
a medal in the Salon of 1881. He kept 
on painting and exhibiting, but French 
criticism beginning to overbalance French 
appreciation he took up a residence in 
London in 1884, and resided there for the 
rest of his life, engaged mainly in portrait 
painting. 

There seems to be a general agreement 
that Sargent had an uncanny gift for 
character-revelation in his portraits. There 
is the story of his painting of a person 


expression. Itis his best mural expression. 


88 


tain lady in a manner 
that caused _ her 
friends to protest. Obligingly the painter 
scraped her out and painted her over. 
She was exactly the same. He scraped her 
out again and once more painted her. 
Still she was the same. 

Sargent’s first visit to his native land, as 
America always was to him, was in 1876, 
when he was twenty years old, and it was 
about fifteen years later that he came to 
do the murals for the Boston Public Library 
—the famous ‘“Prophets.’’ His choice of 
a religious subject was surprising. These 
murals were completed in 1894. 

Of the decorations entitled ‘“The Church” 
and “The Synagogue,” the second caused 
such offense that the Legislature of Mas- 
sachusetts in 1922 passed a bill ordering 
it removed. Subsequently the courts de- 
nied the validity of the legislative act. 
It appeared that the idea of the two pic- 
tures was to show Christianity triumphant 
and Judaism defeated. 


HABAKKUK 


0. 


a ABARKY 5 | 





JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856-1925) Copyright Boston Pub. Lib. Employees Benefit Assn. 
Boston Public Library 


JOHN SINGER SARGENT 


ye 
p 


a Ba 


Gene in terms of pure 

painting John Singer Sargent 
is regarded by critics of au- 
thority as a modern master 
comparable to the great lead- 
ers in the historic periods. Royal Cortissoz 
sees in him “the single American out- 
standing type of genius governed by com- 


A master of water color, it was his habit 
in Italy, in the Alps, in the Holy Land, 
everywhere, to make innumerable travel 
notes. Working in oils, these were often 
but stepping stones to compositions of 
serious import. He could make a Venetian 
street scene or interior, a Spanish court- 
yard, a Florentine villa live again in 


plete technical authority. 
a kind of romantic splendor about it, for 


it was begun in al- 
most dramatic bril- 
liance, and that bril- 
liance persisted over 
a long period. In all 
the picturesque an- 
nals of the _ studio 
there is nothing quite 
like it until we pause 
upon the lives, say, 
of such men as Ru- 
bens and Van Dyck. 
Sargent drew with 
great force and pre- 
cision. His portraits, 
when he was in the 
mood to make them, 
are merciless in their 
truth. He was not 
always in the mood, 


’? His career had 
to reproduce 


OF Sargent’s great decorative figures of 

the Hebrew “Prophets,’”’ in the Boston 
Public Library, the minor ones, notably 
Zephaniah, Joel, Obadiah and especially 
Hosea, have won universal praise. In 
them Sargent came nearest to achieving 
his life-long ambition to be as good a 
mural decorator as portrait painter. Nev- 
ertheless, “It is difficult to think of the 
frieze of the prophets as the work of the 
artist who painted the subsequent deco- 
rations in the same building, in spite of 
the fact that no other painter could be 
associated with either series.”’ During a 
heated controversy over his Boston Public 
Library murals in 1923-4, particularly of 


glittering beauty. That was his function— 
in enchanting form the 


picturesque charm of 


the visible world. 
Sargent was no 
dreamer. It was not 


habitual with him to 
draw upon his imagi- 
nation. But in regis- 
tering tangible facts 
he was proficiency it- 
self, adding to his 
record of the fact a 
beguiling note of 
style. ‘‘He never in 
his life deliberately 
romanticized atheme, 
but he was too much 
of an artist ever to 
leave it exactly as he 
found it. The truth 
painted by Sargent 


and latterly, in fact, 
he is said to have 
come fairly to hate 
the routine and various irritations of por- 
traiture. To a visitor in his London 
studio he once declared in a half-amused, 
half-wrathful outburst, that he would paint 
no more portraits after he had once dis- 
posed of those he was engaged upon. 
‘Women don’t ask you to make them 
beautiful,’ he said, “‘but you can feel 
them wanting you to do so all the time.”’ 
Nevertheless he went on painting portraits, 
even while he wanted most of all to be a 
mural decorator, and his paintings of the 
‘*Prophets’”’ in the Boston Public Library 
reveal with what devotion he pursued this 
great interest in his life. ‘‘They do hardly 
more than that,’’ says a discerning critic. 
“Though they contain some superb epi- 
sodes, they do not as a whole affirm his 
genius in an absolutely convincing manner. 
The peculiar constructive aptitude which is 
essential to the decorative designer work- 
ing against an architectural background 
was for some occult reason denied him.”’ 


“The Synagogue,” it narrowly escaped de- 
struction when it was bespattered with ink. 


90 


was. always. truth 
raised to a higher 
power, made more 
interesting through the beauty of his art.” 
Sargent was an eager reader, an enthusias- 
tic lover of music, and an indefatigable 
student of human nature. He painted the 
notabilities of the world, and in so doing 
acquired rare intellectual insight. He was 
a cosmopolitan, at home anywhere. He 
painted with thought as well as with ex- 
treme dexterity, and the interest of the 
immense body of work he has left behind 
is not only aesthetic but psychological. 
Above all, John Singer Sargent was one 
of the most modest of painters. There is 
a pretty story of his watching a young 
art student at work upon a picture in a 
garden. Asked for some advice he gave it, 
almost diffidently, saying, in a deprecating 
way, that he remembered once painting 
a garden picture of his own, as though, of 
course, the student had not so much as 
heard of it. That was all that he could 
manage to say about the famous ‘“Car- 
nation, Lily—Lily, Rose.”’ 


eer! 


MZEPHANIAN 0 e Ran ANAMS RL ce tas 2 





ieee 


JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856-1925) Copyright Boston Pub. Lib. Employees Benefit Assn. 
Boston Public Library 


MURILLO 


S“GARTOLOME ESTEBAN MU- 

4 RILLO was left an orphan at a 
very tender age, in the care of 
4) a surgeon who had married his 
aunt. Soon afterwards he was 
apprenticed to an uncle, Juan del Cas- 
tillo, a painter of no great ability, in 
Seville, Spain, and young Murillo began 
his career as an artist. The uncle evi- 
dently was a better teacher than painter, 





the money necessary to carry out the 
project he acquired a quantity of linen, 
divided it into squares of different sizes, 
and painted upon them attractive saints, 
bright landscapes, groups of flowers, fruit 
and other subjects designed to attract 
ready purchasers. Then, without a word 
of his intention he set out on foot for 
Madrid, where he arrived footsore, penni- 
less and with no friend to receive him. 


for the pupil was soon 
painting better pic- 
tures than his master. 
When the uncle went 
to live in Cadiz, Mu- 
rillo was left in Se- 
ville to shift for him- 
self, and for two 
years he struggled 
desperately for an ex- 
istence. Seville was 
so overrun with paint- 
ers at the time that 
only the pictures of 
the most celebrated 
brought anything like 
a remunerative price. 
As he haunted the 
market place in 
search of customers, 
Murillo had every op- 
portunity of study- 
ing the features and 
characteristics of the 
street gamins of Se- 


THE Birth of the Virgin’’ was painted 

for the Cathedral of Seville when 
Murillo was thirty-seven years of age. 
Gautier has given this interesting appreci- 
ation of it: “In the center of the composi- 
tion, the baby Virgin swims, as it were, in 
a cloud of light. An old woman, . . . raises 
the child from.the cradle with a caressing 
gesture. But the most marvellous figure 
in the group is the young angel modeled, as 
it seems, from nothing—a rose-colored 
vapor touched with silver. She leans her 
adorable head—made with three brief 
brush strokes—over the Virgin, resting 
one delicate hand on her breast, the fingers 
nestling among the folds of her dress as 
if in the petals of a flower. Above the 
cradle a hovering glory of child angels 
illumines the room.... Half hidden in 
the shadow of the background, the bed of 
the mother may be vaguely distinguished.”’ 


But Murillo had cour- 
age, and he ventured 
to call on the greatest 
artist in Spain, Velas- 
quez, a fellow towns- 
man, and at that time 
court painter to Phil- 
ip IV. Velasquez was 
so pleased with the 
personality of the 
young painter that 
he took him into his 
home. Three years 
later when Murillo, 
having abandoned the 
idea of going to 
Rome, returned to 
his native city of Se- 
ville the first thing he 
did was to accept a 
dubious commission 
which had gone beg- 
ging among Sevillan 
artists to paint eleven 
life-sized figures for a 


ville who appear so 

often and with such lifelike convincingness 
on his canvases. There was plenty of com- 
petition, even in this huckster atmosphere, 
as a great majority of the Sevillan painters 
exhibited their pictures on the streets and 
it was customary to bring brushes and 
colors to the stalls and alter canvases to 
suit the tastes of customers. The young 
artist was getting his education “in the 
university of hard knocks,’’ and he 
missed no opportunity for self-improve- 
ment. 

The turning point in his career came at 
the age of twenty-five when ‘a former 
fellow-pupil of Murillo under Juan del 
Castillo returned from studying in Flan- 
ders and England bringing copies of sev- 
eral paintings by Van Dyck. These so 
fired the ambition of young Murillo that 
he determined to visit Rome. To obtain 


92 


small Franciscan con- 
vent. Murillo grasped the opportunity 
to show what he was capable of doing, 
and spent three years at the work which, 
when finished, established his reputation. 
He had no trouble now securing commis- 
sions; and we presently hear of him marry- 
ing a wealthy noblewoman, and their 
home becoming the resort of the most 
distinguished society in Seville. The fame 
of Murillo grew correspondingly, and in 
1670 the post of court painter was ten- 
dered him by Charles II. But Murillo had 
not been impressed by the honor once 
held by his friend Velasquez, and pre- 
ferred his own independent seclusion in 
Seville. 
It was while he was finishing a large pic- 
ture for a church in Cadiz that the artist 
fell from the scaffolding and sustained 
injuries from which he never recovered. 


THE BIRTH OF THE VIRGIN 





‘MURILLO (1617-1682) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Louvre, Paris 


TINTORETTO 


WAINTORETTO is a nickname 
that has stuck through four 
centuries to the Venetian 
painter whose real name was 
Jacopo Robusti. His father 
was a dyer of silks. The boy helped his 
father at his trade, and was called ‘“‘il 
tintoretto,’’ the little dyer. 

As a youth, Tintoretto amused himself at 
home by making charcoal sketches on the 





S 


DN 


he resembles Michel Angelo. His brain 
fermented; his thoughts boiled; his throng- 
ing conceptions so tormented him that 
he was obliged to rid himself ofthem.” In 
many cases he received no pay at all for 
his work, in others just enough to pay for 
his materials; but he seems always to have 
worked like a Trojan, and whether he was 
paid or not mattered little to him so long as 
he was creating. 


walls and coloring 
them with his father’s 
dyes. This convinced 
the parents that the 
son was born to be a 
painter, and somehow 
the father managed to 
apprentice the boy to 
Titian, who at that 
time was without a 
rival in Venice. 

Titian lived to see his 
pupil win recognition 
and even fame, but 
he never warmed to 
him. In fact he went 
out of his way to dis- 


INTORETTO’S “Presentation of the 

Virgin’? shows Our Lady ascending 
the steps of the Temple, at the top of 
which the high priest awaits the slight 
girlish figure in its gray dress contrasting 
with the blue sky beyond. Groups of 
women and children, ancients and idlers, 
ranged along the steps watch the scene. 
The Venetian staircase has been criticized 
as being too important for the actors, but 
the effect of the figures in shadow is so 
fine, the beauty of the women seated upon 
or ascending the steps so striking, and the 
figure of the Virgin so full of grace and 


Tintoretto had a keen 
sense of humor, and 
man y interesting 
stories are told of 
him. On one occa- 
sion when he was 
working on some 
sketches for his ‘‘Par- 
adise’’ in the Ducal 
Palace he was inter- 
rupted by some dis- 
tinguished _ visitors, 
one of whom in- 
quired why he worked 
so rapidly, observing 
at the same time that 
Giovanni, Bellini and 


parage him, and for- 
bade him his studio. 
Undaunted ,theyoung 
painter opened a studio of his own, ‘and, 
heedless of the rebuff, on the wall he painted 
this sign:' “The drawing of Michel Angelo 
and the coloring of Titian.’”’ To com- 
bine the highest qualities of these great 
painters—two of the greatest that ever 
lived—was an ambitious undertaking for 
so young a painter, but Tintoretto recog- 
nized no limitations. In time he _ sur- 
passed Titian in keenness of observation 
and could even outdo Michel Angelo in 
some respects, particularly in the speed 
with which he could turn out his canvases. 
Titian might shut him out of his studio, 
but he could not close the churches and 
palaces to him. There Tintoretto studied 
Titian’s masterpieces, copied them and 
finally conjured from them their secrets. 
An indefatigable workman, he. refused no 
commissions. His greatest desire was to 
give form and shape to the ideas that 
fairly swarmed in his imagination. 

Tintoretto’s is declared by Taine to have 
been “the most vigorous and _ prolific 
artistic temperament that ever existed. 
In savage originality and in energy of will 


simplicity that, whatever its defects, the 
picture remains to the glory of Tintoretto. 


94 


Titian had been delib- 
erate and painstak- 
ing. “‘The old mas- 
ters,’ Tintoretto replied, ““had not so many 
to bother them as I have.” . 

His aggressive nature and the speed with 
which he executed his canvases is illus- 
trated by the following incident. “Il 
Furioso,’”’ as he came to be known, was 
invited with three other artists to submit 
designs for the ceiling of the refectory at 
San Rocco. Tintoretto took the exact 
measurements, and while the other artists 
labored over their sketches he finished his 
canvas and put it into place. When the 
time came to study the designs and award 
the commission Tintoretto’s finished pic- 
ture was found in place. His competitors 
were furious and the head of the Brother- 
hood displeased. Asked to explain, Tin- 
toretto merely replied: ‘‘This is my method 
of preparing designs. I do not know how 
to make them in any other manner. All 
designs and models for a work should be 
executed in this fashion, so that the per- 
sons interested may not be deceived. If 
you do not think it proper to pay for the 
work and remunerate me for my pains, 
I will make you a present of it.” 


THE PRESENTATION OF THE VIRGIN 






TINTORETTO (1518-1594) Church of Santa Maria pecs a 
enice 


DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 


ANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 
g@ was the son of an exiled Italian 
patriot. He was born in 
1828, in London, where his 
father was Professor of Italian 
at King’s College, and a distinguished and 
original commentator on the works of 
Dante. So the youth of this Anglo-Italian 
painter-poet was spent in the atmosphere 
of Dante—the gloomy Florentine—and the 
world created by the 
mystical genius of the 





Italian Renaissance 
became his spiritual 
home. 


At eighteen Rossetti of age. 


became a pupil at the 
Royal Academy and 
even at that early age 
seemed to hold his 
friends under what is 
described as a pecu- 
liar hypnotic influ- 
ence. He was tall 
and thin, always 
walked with a slight 
stoop; was reserved 
in manner and care- 
less in appearance. 
The year of 1848 was 
an important one to Rossetti and to the 
development of art in England. He had 
formed a friendship with Holman Hunt, 
with whom he shared a studio, and through 
Hunt he became acquainted with John 
Everett Millais, his junior by a year, 
though already an exhibiting painter of 
promise. With these three young men— 
Hunt, Rossetti and Millais, aged respec- 
tively twenty-one, twenty and nineteen 
years—originated the movement known 
as the Pre-Raphaelitism—an emulation 
of the sincerity and love of truth that 
characterized the early Italian painters and 
gave way to artificiality after Raphael. 
The term originated as a nickname, some- 
body exclaiming when they had expressed 
a preference for the painters before Raphael 
to those who succeeded him, ‘‘Why then 
you must be Pre-Raphaelites.’’ The title 
was adopted as an Official label which fitly 
conveyed their aims which, as Sir William 
Orpen says, ‘“‘were to paint nature with 
minute fidelity, and to regain the passion- 
ate intensity of the masters of the Renais- 
sance.”’ 


Anne. 


mother of Deity.” 


THE Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ was 
Rossetti’s first oil painting. 
done when the artist was only twenty years 
The Virgin is seated at an em- 
broidery frame copying a white lily, under 
the direction of her mother, St. Anne. 
Rossetti’s sister, Christina, was the model 
for the. Virgin, and his mother for St. 
The picture is full of delicate 
sentiment and its dominant idea is un- 
mistakable, “the Virgin advances in purity 
until fitted to become the bride and 
Outside the room a 
dove rests, and in the garden is St. 
Joachim, the Virgin’s father, training a 
vine, the tendrils of which form a cross. 


96 


It was at this time that Rossetti’s fancy 
turned to Biblical subjects and he painted 
the picture called ‘“The Girlhood of Mary 
Virgin.”’ 

As a working organization the so-called 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ceased to exist 
after two or three years. The members 
drifted apart, each painting in his own 
special manner; but its influence pro- 
foundly affected the art, especially the 
decorative art, of 
England, and it is 
now recognized as 
one of the important 
movements in the his- 
tory of painting. 

As for Rossetti, his 
religious tendency 
soon suffered an 
eclipse and we find 
him passing under the 
spell of Dante, whose 
influence was to domi- 
nate the art of Ros- 
setti for the rest of 
his life. Undoubtedly 
his greatest picture is 
‘‘Dante’s Dream.”’ 
After his first exhibi- 
tion of Bible pictures 
Rossetti exhibited publicly only once again, 
in 1856. After that he worked in seclusion 
for his friends and the friends of his friends. 
One of them was John Ruskin, the great 
critic and art patron, who agreed to buy, 
up to a certain amount, and at a mutually 
satisfactory price, any picture by Rossetti 
that struck his fancy. This arrangement 
ended only when the painter ‘“‘could no 
longer brook the constant criticisms which 
Ruskin could not refrain from expressing.”’ 
In 1860 Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, 
a milliner’s assistant, who had sat for him 
with more or less frequency for ten years. 
Two years later this passionately loved 
woman died from the effects of an over- 
dose of laudanum, and Rossetti laid a whole 
volume of poems in manuscript in her coffin, 
and retired to an old house at Chelsea and 
gave himself up completely to his dreams. 
Eight years later, under pressure from his 
friends, he caused the grave of his wife 
to be opened and took from it the manu- 
scripts, which he published. The first edi- 
tion was sold in ten days and numerous 
other editions followed. 


It was 


THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY VIRGIN 


reerta 





DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882) Owned by Mrs. Jekyll 


FRA ANGELICO 


T is related of Fra Angelico, 
whose baptismal name _ was 
Guido and who was born at 
Vicchio, near Florence, Italy, 
in 1387, that being invited to 
breakfast by Pope Nicholas V he had 
scruples of conscience as to eating meat 
without the permission of his prior, not 
considering that the authority of the pon- 
tiff superseded that of the prior. Such 
was his simple ear 
nestness of purpose. 
Guido probably would 
have been content to 


RA ANGELICO painted this “Annun- 
ciation” in the upper corridor of the 


ius IV to decorate a chapel adjoining St. 
Peter’s, which was razed less than a cen- 
tury later to make room for the great 
staircase of the Vatican Palace. At the 
age of sixty, he entered upon the crown- 
ing achievement of his life—the decora- 
tion of the Chapel of Nicholas V in the 
Vatican, on the walls of which he painted 
his famous frescos representing scenes from 
the lives of Sts. Laurence and Stephen. 

Fra Angelico disre- 
garded all earthly ad- 
vantages, and strove 
to live in simple holi- 


follow the profession 
of a painter alone had 
it not been for the 
great Italian preacher 
and scholar, Giovanni 
Dominici, a Domini- 
can friar, who, early 
in the fifteenth cen- 
tury, established a 
monastery at Fiesole 
to which Quido 
sought and obtained 
admission at the age 
of twenty. <A year 


cloisters of San Marco, Florence. Of it 
Taine remarks: “‘Such immaculate mod- 
esty, such virginal candor! By her side 
Raphael’s Virgins are merely vigorous 
peasant girls.” This painting reflects 
clearly the pious nature of the artist, who 
was diligently seeking in pictures like this 
to “express the inner life of the adoring 
soul.”” At eventide the Virgin is shown 
seated in an open loggia, reverently re- 
ceiving the message brought by the angel 
who has just alighted and bows to her and 
designates her the chosen one of God. 


ness. He labored con- 
tinually at his paint- 
ings, but, Vasari re- 
cords, would do noth- 
ing dissociated from 
things holy. ‘He 
might have been rich, 
but of riches he took 
no care; on the con- 
trary, he was accus- 
tomed to say that the 
only true riches was 
contentment with lit- 
tle. He might have 


later he changed his 

name to Giovanni, being known as Fra 
Giovanni da Fiesole. It was not until 
after his death and beatification that he 
was called Angelico, the Angelic. 

In the summer of 1435, Fra Angelico 
removed from the convent of his order at 
Fiesole, where he had painted the great 
“Coronation of the Virgin,’? now in the 
Louvre, to the newly renovated Convent 
of San Marco at Florence, which now 
contains his ‘‘Last Judgment,” four great 
Madonnas and sundry other of his pic- 
tures. There, writes Langton Douglas, 
before the buildings were fairly com- 
pleted, he began to decorate the interior 
walls of the convent, which in time be- 
came a perfect treasure-house of his works. 
The “Crucifixion,” which Fra Angelico 
painted in the chapter-house, is the largest 
and one of the most important of his 
achievements. He painted frescos of the 
chief Dominican saints in the cloisters, 
and decorated the cloister corridors and 
walls of the cells with sacred subjects, 
principally scenes from the life of Christ. 
Thus occupied for a decade, Fra Angelico 
was summoned to Rome by Pope Eugen- 


98 


commanded many, 
but would not do so, declaring that there 
was less fatigue and less danger of error 
in obeying than in commanding others.” 
Estimating Fra Angelico as an artist, 
Muther says that ‘“‘when he does not leave 
his proper sphere, and the problem is to 
portray tender feelings, a great and silent 
joy of the heart, a holy ecstasy or tender 
sadness, his pictures have the effect of 
the silent prayer of a child.” 
It was his custom to abstain from re- 
touching or improving any painting once 
finished. He altered nothing, believing, as 
he said, that such was the divine will. 
It also is affirmed that he would never 
take brush in hand until he had first 
offered a prayer. 
In 1455, at sixty-eight, this good man and 
great painter died in Rome, in the his- 
toric convent of his order, Santa Maria 
Sopra Minerva, and was buried near the 
high altar in the convent church. At the 
command of Pope Nicholas his effigy was 
carved upon his marble tomb, together 
with an epitaph, in Latin, composed, it is 
said, by the pope himself, inspired by the 
virtues of the holy monk. 


THE ANNUNCIATION 


& 


eo 





FRA ANGELICO (1387-1455) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Luke I, 28 San Marco, Florence 


MURILLO 


URILLO, who passed nearly 
all his life in Seville, Spain, 
and painted for conventual 
churches, hospitals and sac- 
risties, had to paint the sub- 
jects that pleased the devout of his day and 
country, such as the “Immaculate Con- 
ception,’ the visions of the monastery 
cell, the mysteries and ecstasies of as- 
ceticism Indeed, the subject of the Im- 
maculate Conception 
was painted so often 
by Murillo that he 
came to be known as 
“the painter of the 
Conception.” The 
one we reproduce was 
painted for a hcespital 
in Seville. It was 
purchased by the 
French Government 
in 1852, from the 
Marshal Soult sale, 
for 586,000 francs. 
An anecdote is told 





x- 


paintings. 


of the manner in 
which the French 
Marshal comman- 


deered this picture 
during his military oc- 
cupancy of Seville. It 
had been hidden by 
the chapter of the 
Cathedral, but a 
traitor informed Soult of its whereabouts 
and he sent to beg it as a present, hinting 
that if refused he would take it by force. 
Some years after, in Paris, the worthy 
Marshal was showing a wealthy con- 
noisseur his collection, and pausing oppo- 
site a Murillo, said, ‘I very much value 
that specimen. It saved the lives of 
two estimable persons.’”’ An aide-de-camp 
who was standing near whispered, ‘‘He 
threatened to have both of them shot on 
the spot unless they gave up the picture.”’ 
Of Murillo as a painter of ineffable figures, 
Justi observes that the Spaniard ‘“‘had to 
depict what he had never seen; he had to 
wrestle for years with such a problem as 
how to paint successfully a human face 
set against a background of glowing light. 
But his critics shut their eyés to his mar- 
vellous mastery of the illustrative appara- 
tus, asserting that his effects are purely 
materialistic, though hundreds of artists, 


Englishmen. 


THE march of French armies through- 

out the Spanish peninsula in the days 
of the first Napoleon brought about an 
extension of the fame of Spanish art; for 
their retreating baggage-trains carried into 
northern Europe hundreds of priceless 
Marshal Soult was especially 
energetic in plundering southern Spain of 
its pictures, including this “Immaculate 
Conception” and other Murillos. 
Marshal seized the objects, and carefully 
guarded the legality of their titles by 
forcing their owners to sign fictitious bills 
of sale. The trophies were transferred to 
Paris; and for many years afterwards the 
thrifty veteran derived a large income 
from selling them, one by one, to wealthy 
As a result the best Mu- 
rillos are found today, not 
where they were painted, but in England. 


already forgotten or passing into oblivion, 
have produced precisely similar effects so 
far as the material outside is concerned.”’ 
Critics are agreed that Murillo owes his 
artistic greatness, and his world-wide 
popularity, to the fact that he recognized 
the unique character and special charm 
of the human nature of southern Spain, 
adapted it to the palette and brush, and 
ventured to introduce it into paintings of 
religious subjects. In 
doing this he was an 
originator of the first 
order. The Andalu- 
sian saints and Ma- 
donnas seen elsewhere 
might just as well 
have been painted in 
Naples or in Amster- 
dam. Like Rem- 
brandt, Murillo rec- 
ognized with the in- 
sight of genius that 
Biblical history and 
the legends of the 
saints could be best 
narrated in the dia- 
lect of the people. 

To describe this art- 
ist as an improvisa- 
tore, who “paints as 
the bird sings,’’ is to 
hit beside the mark. 

“‘Few painters have so 
well understood the art of pictorial com- 
position or known so well how to charm 
the eye by gradations of light, skilful 
attitudes and adroit foreshortenings; few 
have calculated their effects more care- 
fully.”” To M. Beulé, the only divisions 
evident in the art of Murillo are “those 
which mark his progress successively from 
a formative period, when to gain a liveli- 
hood he was hastily daubing bits of linen 
at the fair; a second, when he was de- 


The 


in Spain 


veloping his style by a study of the mas- 


100 


terpieces in Madrid; and a third, when he 
finally became master of his individual 
talent. It would be a more exact descrip- 
tion to say, simply, that one picture is 
badly composed and crude in color and de- 
Sign, that another is, on the contrary, 
vigorously painted, and that a third is ren- 
dered so that the outlines seem half lost 
in clouds.”’ A “‘happy freedom from bonds” 
is everywhere evident in his works. 


THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 


mee 





MURILLO (1617-1682) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Luke I Louvre, Paris 


ALBERTINELLI 


(777 T was both the fortune and mis- 
fortune of Mariotto Albertinelli, 

Ni a distinguished, if not a great, 
painter of the Florentine school, 

2 to have been closely associated 
during most of his maturity with Fra 
Bartolommeo, to whose work his own is 
compared and not always to its advan- 
tage. Albertinelli, the son of a gold-beater, 
and born in 1474, was a year older than 


he executed a number of pictures. The 
dissimilarity of his nature and that of his 
partner artist was forcibly shown at the 
time Savonarola, the renowned preaching 
friar and reformer, was predicting for 
Florence the doom of Sodom and Gomor- 
rah. Among those who most ardently em- 
braced his cause was Bartolommeo, one of 
his earliest adherents. Albertinelli, on the 
contrary, joined the opposing faction and 


Bartolommeo, whose 
serious and gentle na- 
ture was in marked 
contrast to the gay 
and somewhat boister- 
ous disposition of the 
older artist, but who, 
nevertheless, became 
his chosen and closest 
friend. 

Associated in an ap- 
prenticeship that 
lasted six or seven 
years the two lads, 
feeling that they had 
nothing more to learn 
from their teacher, 
formed a partnership, 
rented a studio in 
common and became 
artists on their own 
account. Doubtless, 
ventures a biographer, 


& 


‘HIS “Visitation” is regarded as the 

best of the works done by Albertinelli 
alone, other than in collaboration with 
his friend, Fra Bartolommeo. It was 
painted in 1503 when the artist was 
twenty-nine years old. The picture is 
notable for its coloring and for the expres- 
sive attitudes of the two women. It 
illustrates the passage in Luke I, 59-41: 
“And Mary arose in those days, and went 
into the hill country with haste, into a city 
of Juda; and entered into the house of 
Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth. And it 
came to pass that, when Elisabeth heard 
the salutation of Mary, the babe |John the 
Baptist] leaped in her womb; and Elisa- 
beth was filled with the Holy Ghost.” 
The birth of John the Baptist preceded that 
of Christ by about six months. 


openly scoffed at the 
Piagnoni, or Mourn- 
ers, as the followers of 
Savonarola were de- 
risively called. The 
rupture was of short 
duration, however, 
and beforelongtheart- 
ists were again work- 
ing in partnership. 

The tide of popular 
feeling turned against 
Savonarola when Al- 
bertinelli and his 
friend were respec- 
tively twenty-four 
and twenty-three 
years of age. Al- 
though engaged on 
decorating the walls 
of a chapel adjoining 
the Hospital of Santa 
Nuova, Florence, 


they spent much time 

in the Medici gardens, where Lorenzo 
the Magnificent, then ruler of Florence, had 
collected many valuable specimens of an- 
tique statuary, which were eagerly studied 
by the Florentine artists of the time; 
but ‘‘while Albertinelli gave his whole at- 
tention to copying these marbles, Bartolom- 
meo studied also the works of Masaccio, 
of Filippino Lippi and, above all, of 
Leonardo da Vinci. His progress was 
rapid, and his influence over his friend in 
all matters pertaining to art, in spite of 
their different dispositions, was so strong 
that most of Albertinelli’s work bears a 
strong resemblance to that of Bartolom- 
meo.” 

Albertinelli appears to have been anything 
but fastidious in the choice of his pleasures, 
was a tavern frequenter and a sort of 
Frangois Villon of Florence. He had as a 
protectress the wife of Pierre de Medici, 
whose portrait he painted, and for whom 


102 


with a great fresco of 
the “‘Last Judgment,’’—‘‘a worthy prelude 
to the ‘Disputa’ of Raphael’’—Bartolom- 
meo, who had planned and drawn in the 
whole composition, left the remainder of the 
work to Albertinelli, and himself became a 
Dominican novice. So capably did Alberti- 
nelli carry the fresco to completion that 
“its faded and almost ruined remains, now 
removed to the picture-gallery of Santa 
Maria Nuova, offer one of the noblest and 
most impressive examples of monumental 
composition.”’ 
In 1509, or some eight years later, it is 
recorded that an “artist-layman’’ was 
introduced into the quiet monastery of 
San Marco, where Fra Bartolommeo, hav- 
ing concluded his novitiate, appears to 
have resumed painting. The ‘“‘artist-lay- 
man’”’ is known to have been Albertinelli. 
He died toward the end of 1515, in his 
forty-second year, preceding by two years 
the death of Fra Bartolommeo. 


THE VISITATION 





ALBERTINELLI (1474-1515) 


Luke I, 40 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 


Uffizi Gallery, Florence 


RAPHAEL 


SIP AHAT Raphael, Michel Angelo 


a and Leonardo da Vinci, three 





supreme masters of art, should 
have been contemporaries, liv- 
ing and painting literally side 


DN 


by side in the greatest days of the Italian 
Renaissance, is the most remarkable coin- 
cidence in that remarkable period. Raphael 
Sanzio, or Santi, was born on’ Good Friday 
of the year 1483 in the ducal city of 


figures, by Michel Angelo, in competition 
with Leonardo, whom he had on that 
occasion greatly surpassed.” 

To Florence hastened young Raphael to 
behold the commended works, and, adds 
Vasari, ‘‘he stood dumb before the splen- 
dor of Leonardo’s figures, and thought 
him superior to all other masters.... At 
the same time Michel Angelo’s mastery of 
the human frame impressed him pro- 


Urbino, and died in 


Rome thirty-seven 
years later to a day, 
just before finishing 
his glorious picture 
of ‘‘The Transfigura- 
tion.’ All his life he 
seems never to have 
suffered any serious 
vicissitudes. His 
first teacher was his 
father, a painter of 
considerable talent, 
who -early perceived 
in his son an artistic 
inclination, and the 
latter is reported by 
Vasari to have 
“greatly assisted his 
father in numerous 
works executed in the 
State of Urbino.’’ The 
extent of his assist- 
ance may be ques- 
tioned in view of the 
fact that Raphael was 


APHAEL’S “Marriage of the Virgin’’ 

was his first original picture of im- 
portance. Its subject had been a favorite 
one with painters for more than two cen- 
turies. In treating it Raphael followed the 
accepted legend, relating that there were 
so many competitors for the Virgin’s hand 
that the High Priest ordered every bache- 
lor to lay a dry rod on the altar, and de- 
clared that he whose rod should bud 
should be the husband of Mary. Among 
the suitors was Joseph, an elderly man 
and a widower, whose rod alone budded; 
and as it did so a dove descended from 
heaven and lighted upon it. The Virgin 
is attended by five young women, Joseph 
by five young men—rejected suitors, of 
whom one in the foreground breaks his 
rod, which had failed to blossom. This 
picture is not so noted for its coloring as 
for its masterly composition and arrange- 
ment of figures. Init “Raphael treats the 
subject finally, definitively and for all time.” 


foundly, and he ap- 
plied himself with ar- 
dor to learn the prin- 
ciples of anatomy. 
Night and day he 
studied the structure 
of the body, learning 
in a few months what 
others take years to 
acquire.”’ Notwith- 
standing his youth, 
Raphael was. wel- 
comed as an equal by 
theartistsof Florence, 
among whom he made 
many friends; and 
his beauty of person 
and charm of manner 
captivated everyone. 
Of the manner in 
which Raphael, at 
twenty-five, was sum- 
moned to Rome to as- 
sist in decorating the 
Vatican we tell else- 
where. So rapid was 


left an orphan at the 

age of eleven, in care of an uncle who 
placed him in the studio of Perugino, at 
Perugia. His mother had died three years 
previously, leaving memories of her deeply 
etched in his mind. 

Under Perugino, who was regarded as the 
greatest master of technique in his time, 
and another of whose pupils was Pintu- 
ricchio, Raphael remained for nine or ten 
years, acquiring Perugino’s technique so 
perfectly that ‘‘their works could not be 
told apart.’’ It was about this time that 
Raphael painted ‘‘The Marriag2 of the 
Virgin.’”” Then, writes Vasari, reports 
reached Perugia of a cartoon which Lec- 
nardo da Vinci had prepared for a “‘most 
beautiful group of horses to be executed 
for the Great Hall of the Palace at Flor- 
ence,’ and another “representing nude 


104 


his progress, how- 
ever, that by the time he was thirty ‘“‘he 
was never seen to go to court without 
being surrounded and accompanied, as he 
left his house, by some fifty painters, all 
men of ability and distinction, as evidence 
of the honor in which he was held.” 
Meeting him on one of these occasions, 
Michel Angelo growled out, ““You look like 
a general at the head of an army.”’ 
Laughing, Raphael retorted, “‘and you, 
sir, like an executioner on the way to the 
scaffold.”’ 
Rome in the course of time was divided 
in opinion as to the relative merits of 
Raphael and Michel Angelo, and formed 
two great parties, that of Raphael being, 
it is said, the more numerous. On page 
160 are given further and very interesting 
particulars of their rivalry. 


THE MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN 


APR. 





RAPHAEL (1483-1520) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. I, 24, Luke I, 27 Brera Gallery, Milan 


MASACCIO 


ASACCIO is the slightly slur- 
ring nickname, inspired by the 





“‘absent-mindedness, untidi- 
ness, and physical clumsi- 
ness.”” of Tomaso di Ser 


Giovanni di Tomasso Guidi, “the father 
of modern painting,’’ who came into the 
world about Christmas time in 1401 and 
mysteriously dropped out of sight at Rome 
in 1428, being less than twenty-seven years 
old. Some report that 
he was poisoned, oth- 

ers that he was slain A 
in astreet brawl. The 
truth of the matter 
is not known. What 


we do know is, to 
quote Professor Frank 
Jewett Mather, of 
Princeton, that ‘“‘in 


the recorded history 
of art no painter had 
achieved so_ greatly 
in so short a time. 
Within six years Ma- 
saccio created that 
method of painting 
which stood uncon- 
tested till the advent 
of luminism some 
forty years ago. And 
he not merely illustrated the method of 
construction in light and dark, painting in 
atmospheric values rather than in lines 
and charted areas, but he also expressed 
in the new technic both the noblest tradi- 
tional emotions and poignant new emo- 
tions quite his own. In one superb 
aggressive he moved three generations 
into the future. For a hundred years 
the most intelligent and ambitious artists in 
Florence—Eotticelli, Ghirlandajo, Leonardo 
da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Raphael, Andrea 
del Sarto— paid homage to the untidy 
youth from Castel: San Giovanni, and 
even the iconoclasts of today, for whom 
Leonardo da Vinci and his peers are 
scarcely artists at all, envy the gravity 
and force of Masaccio.” , 

Tradition as late as Vasari declared that 
this young Florentine genius lived in a 
world of intense speculation concerning 
his art. Contemporary tax-returns show 
that he died deeply in debt, and that he 
never really knew how much he owed. 
Tradition again insists that he never 


Florentine mother. 


LITTLE giant of a picture” is what 
the celebrated critic Berensen calls 
Masaccio’s “Birth of St. John the Baptist.” 
It was executed as a birth-plate, or pic- 
tured salver, such as it was customary at 
the time to prepare in celebrating the 
birth of a patrician child in Florence. 
These salvers were used to convey the 
congratulatory gifts which were offered 
with appalling promptness to every young 
This, the most famous 
of them all, shows, in the excellent pro- 
portions of the Renaissance portico, in 
the gravity and mass of the figures, the 
“beginnings of a new and more truthful 
style, based not on tradition but on direct 
and masterful observation of nature.”’ 


troubled to collect payments due him 
unless his need of money was extreme. 

Becoming an art student in Florence as a 
mere lad, he was matriculated in the 
Druggists’ Guild as a licensed painter at 
twenty-one, and coincidentally announced 
that the painting of his contemporaries 
and predecessors was all based on unnat- 
ural conventions. One fancies him exclaim- 
ing, as Goya was to do more than three 
centuries later, 
“Lines, always lines, 
I don’t see them in 


nature.”’ 
His radical innova- 
tion was to paint 


according to natural 
laws, distributing color 
and light and dark so 
as to give the swiftest 
and truest represen- 
tation of mass and 
distance. ‘“‘Besides 
functional light and 
shade, Masaccio in- 
troduced into paint- 
ing the idea of aerial 
perspective. He saw 
that distant objects 
diminished not mere- 
ly in size but also in 
definition. He felt the air as a palpable 
veil between the object and the eye, and 
he painted not simply the object but the 
veil, as well. By a swift impulse of sheer 
genius this moody lad fixed ideals of natu- 
ralistic painting which were to remain until 
yesterday and the Impressionists. Funda- 
mentally, Velasquez marks no great ad- 
vance over Masaccio.”’ 

It is in his fresco painting that Masaccio is 
most happy. Reviewing those frescos in 
the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmelite 
Church at Florence, the great Italian critic 
Cavalcaselle observes that in them ‘the 


spirit of art derived mostly from Giotto” 


106 


and that “it was highly important for the 
whole ongoing art of Italy that so revolu- 
tionary a spirit was tempered by the finest 
respect for the great classic tradition.” 
Masaccio is said to have borne a strong 
resemblance to the alert figure of St. 
Thomas in his upper fresco on the right wall 
of the Chapel, near which is that of “‘The 
Tribute Money,”’ appraised as “‘one of the 
grandest creations of European art.” 


THE BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST 





MASACCIO (1401-1428) Berlin Museum 


Luke I, 57 


GHIRLANDAJO 


IKE so many of the famous 
artists of the MRenaissance, 
Domenico di Tommaso di 
Currado Bigordi is best known 
to posterity by a sobriquet. 
The name Ghirlandajo derives from gar- 
lands (ghirlande) and stuck to Domenico 
as a souvenir of his early apprenticeship 
to a Florentine goldsmith ‘“‘where he 
learned to make the beautiful garlands 





that David went to the abbot apologetically 
saying that his protest was made entjrely 
on account of his brother, ‘whose merits 
and abilities deserved consideration.’ ”’ 
Nothing fit to eat was served at their next 
meal, however, and ‘‘David rose in a rage, 
threw the soup over the friar, and seizing 
the great loaf from the board fell upon him 
therewith, and belabored him in such 
fashion that he was carried to his cell 


which earned him the 
name by which he 
was thenceforth 
known.”’ 

Ghirlandajo was born 
in 1449, two years be- 
fore the birth of Bot- 
ticelli and only three 
years before that of 
Leonardo da_ Vinci; 
both of whom out- 
lived him many years, 
working well into the 
first quarter of the 
sixteenth century, 
while Ghirlandajo 
died six years before 
its opening. 


A®* a result of his work on the walls of 

the Sistine Chapel, the fame of 
Ghirlandajo spread over Italy and fairly 
took root in his native Florence, where 
the list of his pictures grew steadily and 
rapidly. By 1485 he had executed one of 
his most important commissions—the dec- 
oration of the Sassetti Chapel in Santa 
Trinita with frescos representing scenes 
from the life of St. Francis. The altar- 
piece was “The Nativity’’, on one side of 
which, it is interesting to read, was 
painted the kneeling figure of Francesco 
Sassetti, donor of the Chapel and a 
wealthy and influential Florentine banker, 


more dead than alive. 
The abbot, who had 
gone to bed, arose on 
hearing the clamor, 
believing the monas- 
tery to be falling 
down, and finding the 
monk in a bad condi- 
tion, began to re- 
proach David. But 
the latter replied in a 
fury, declaring the 
talents of his brother 
to be worth more 
than all the hogs of 
abbots of his’ sort 
that had ever in- 
habited the monas- 


Little is known of 
his youth. In 1475, 
when he was twenty-six, he painted certain 
frescos in the Vatican library at Rome; 
and evidently he had achieved considerable 
reputation in his native Florence or he 
would not have been commanded to join 
that band of famous men who were be- 
ginning to turn the Palace of the Pope 
into the marvellous museum of art it after- 
wards became. Vasari states that his 
frescos for the Vespucci family (of which 
Amerigo, the discoverer, was a member) 
were his first pictures, and his assertion 
that one of the kneeling suppliants in 
Ghirlandajo’s ‘‘Descent from the Cross’’ 
was a portrait of Amerigo Vespucci was 
unquestioned until recently. 

While returning from Rome to Florence 
a year or so later, Ghirlandajo, his brother 
David, and an assisting , painter named 
Sebastiano, who was to become their 
brother-in-law, painted a ‘“‘Last Supper”’ 
in the fabulously rich Vallombrosan mon- 
astery at Passignano. According to Va- 
sari, the painters might have fared better 
with a poorer brotherhood, for “they 
found themselves so badly fed and lodged 


and on the other side, that of his wife. 


108 


tery. The abbot be- 
ing thus brought to 
his senses, did his best from that moment 
to treat them like honorable men as they 
were.”’ 

Ghirlandajo was far from having the 
poetic, dreamy nature whose material 
needs must be shielded and supplied by 
others. But he permitted nothing to in- 
terfere with his work, and Vasari says that 
he gave entire charge of his purse and 
menage to his brother, telling him to 
“leave me to work, and do thou provide, 
for now that I have begun to get into 
the spirit and to comprehend the matter 
of this art, I grudge that they do not 
commission me to paint the whole circuit 
of the walls of Florence with stories.’’ 

In his country, as George Lafenestre ob- 
serves, Ghirlandajo closed the Fifteenth 
Century with much of the éclat with 
which Masaccio opened it. He stands on 
the last rung of the ladder which rose from 
Giotto towards the great geniuses of the 
Renaissance, only some feet below Leo- 
nardo, his competitor, and Michel Angelo, 
his pupil. As such, he remains a com- 
manding figure in Italian art. 


HE NATIVITY 






ae 


— ea 


GHIRLANDAJO (1449-1494) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Luke II, 7 Santa Trinita, Florence 


JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 


N the little French churchyard 
of Damvillers in Lorraine, be- 
neath an old apple-tree that 
he loved so dearly, rest the 
mortal remains of a painter for 
whom France went into mourning in the 
year 1884—-Jules Bastien-Lepage. He was 
thirty-six years of age, and his death 
occurred a month after that of his tal- 
ented and distinguished young Russian 
pupil, Marie Baskirt- 
scheff, just as her 


ASTIEN-LEPAGE was twenty-seven 


the Lorraine peasants is the theme of 
nearly all his pictures, the Lorraine land- 
scape is their setting. He painted what 
he loved, and he loved what he painted.”’ 

To please his parents Bastien-Lepage 
twice competed for the Prix de Rome in 
1873 and in 1875 with an ‘‘Annunciation 
of the Angel to the Shepherds,” that now 
famous picture which received the medal 
at the World Exhibition of 1878. Both 
times he was fortu- 
nate enough to be un- 
in 


pictures began to cre- 
ate a sensation. A 
touching idyll in her 
diary tells how she 
learnt, when she was 
dying of consumption 
in her twenty-fourth 
year, that young Bas- 
tien had also fallen ill, 
and been given up as 
a hopeless case. 

Born in Damvillers, 
in 1848, Bastien- 
Lepage as a boy 
played among the 
venerable moats 
which had been con- 
verted into orchards. 
Thus in his youth he 
received the freshest 


when he painted his “Annunciation 
to the Shepherds.” Its night effect is 
Rembrandtesque; yet the colors are not 
harmonized in gold-brown, but in a cool 
gray silver tone. Observe how simple is 
the effect of the heavenly appearance upon 
the shepherds lying ’round the fire of 
coals. In place of the curly ideal heads of 
the old sacred painting are those of 
bristly, unwashed men who, gnarled and 
weather-beaten, receive the miracle with 
the simplicity of elemental natures. Fear 
and abashed astonishment are reflected 
in their faces, and the plain and homely 
gestures of their hands correspond to their 
inward excitement. Even the angel pres- 
ence is a simple and human conception. 


successful, for ‘‘i 
Italy Bastien-Lepage 
would only have been 
spoilt for art. The 
model for him was 
not one of the old 
masters, but nature 
as she is in Damvil- 
lers.”” As evidence 
of his paradoxical 
good fortune there 
was soon exhibited 
the portrait of his 
grandfather, ‘‘that 
marvellous work of a 
young man of twenty- 
five ... the first pic- 
ture in which he was 
completely himself.’’ 


impressions, being 

brought up in the heart of nature. 
Having left school in Verdun, where he 
took several prizes for drawing, he went 
to study in Paris in 1861. For some 
months he was a student by day and at 
night was a postal clerk. This double labor 
proving impracticable, he gave himself en- 
tirely to art study, entering the class of 
Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. 
Fortunately, as Professor Muther com- 
ments, the outbreak of the Franco- 
Prussian War prevented Bastien-Lepage 
from remaining long at the academy. He 
entered a company of Franc-Tireurs, took 
part in the defence of Paris, and returned 
ill to Damvillers. While recuperating he 
came to know himself and his peculiar 
talent. ‘‘At once a poet and a realist, he 
began to look at nature with that simple 
frankness which those alone possess who 
have learnt from youth upwards to see 
with their own eyes instead of trusting to 
other people’s.”’ As a result, ‘“‘the life of 


110 


Successive pictures 
showed that he had 
not merely rusticity and nature to rely 
upon, but that he was a charmeur in 
the best sense of the word. By his two 
pictures, “The Hay Harvest”? and ‘‘The 
Potato Harvest,’’ in 1878-9, Bastien- 
Lepage placed himself in the first line of 
modern French painters. Then he went 
farther with “‘Joan of Arc,’’ his master- 
piece in point of spiritual expression. 
Bastien-Lepage was never robust physi- 
cally, nor was Parisian life calculated to 
invigorate him. Slender and delicate, 
blond with blue eyes and a sharply chis- 
elled profile, he was of the type which 
Parisians adore. His studio was be- 
sieged; there was no entertainment to 
which he was not invited, no committee, 
no meeting to pass judgment on pictures 
at which he was not present. And then, 
younger than was the young Raphael 
whom death took at thirty-seven, Bastien- 
Lepage was stricken with lung trouble and 
succumbed after a brief illness. 





BASTIEN-LEPAGE (1848-1884) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Luke II, 8 


HENRI LEROLLE 


T was both the good and bad 
. fortune of the remarkable 
French painter, Henri Lerolle, 
to be a born artist and to be 
economically independent. His 
independence made it possible for him to 
work entirely to please himself, instead of 
patrons, and to work in a seclusion that 
has greatly retarded the full measure of 
recognition warranted by his genius. Born 





were subdued and softened until, as in 
the early pictures o: Lerolle, they even 
became idyllic. Moreover, the scale of 
painting over life-size, favored in the 
early years of the movement, was being 
abandoned, since it arose essentially from 
competition with the works of the historical 
school. To Lerolle the transition to a 
smaller scale was particularly happy, as 
being better fitted for intimate studies, 


in Paris in 1848, he 
early exhibited a de- 
cided ability to draw, 
and it does not ap- 
pear that his parents 
were opposed to his 
‘dabbling in art.’’ On 
the contrary, while 
still in his teens Le- 
rolle became a pupil 
of Lamothe, of whom 
even less has been 
written than about 
himself. Under this 
master he studied two 
years, and made his 
début at the Paris 
Salon of 1868 with 
two canvases, ‘‘Does 
in the Forest,’’ and 
“Kitchen Utensils.”’ 
Neither of these pic- 


N his “‘Arrival of the Shepherds,” Lerolle 

tells pictorially one of the most appealing 
of the great Bible stories. It is at the 
moment when the shepherds, having been 
directed to Bethlehem by the angel of the 
Lord, entering the stable, “found Mary 
and Joseph, and the babe lying in a man- 
ger.” A divine radiance is on the Mother 
and Child, at whom the wondering shep- 
herds gaze speechlessly, one with hand 
upraised and another kneeling. Near them 
the ass, upon which Mary had ridden 
into the city of David, stops drinking at 
a trough and seems to be puzzled by the 
strange visitation. Joseph prepares to rise 
from a mound of straw, on which he is 
seated, as he turns his head toward the 
group of intruders. This picture is famed 
for its masterly treatment of light. 


such as his own. 

In 1874 Lerolle be- 
gan to paint religious 
pictures, on which he 
was to specialize for 
a long time. Six 
years later he re- 
ceived a first-class 
medal at the Salon, 
with his “In the 
Country,’’ now in the 
Luxembourg, follow- 
ing an honorable men- 
tion in the 1878 Salon 
of his ‘Communion 
of the Apostles.”’ It 
was in 1883 that he 
exhibited his most 
celebrated religious 
painting, “‘The Ar- 
rival of the Shep- 
herds’’; and it was a 


tures, which were fa- 

vorably received by critics and connois- 
seurs, gave any indication of the future 
trend of his talent. 

What they did display was a marked 
ability to paint natural objects in a 
simple, natural manner. It was at the 
time that the school of Naturalism was 
coming into its own in France, a move- 
ment of which Zola wrote, ‘‘Naturalism 
does not depend upon the choice of sub- 
ject. The whole of society is its domain, 
from the drawing-room to the slum. It is 
only idiots who would make Naturalism 
solely the rhetoric of the gutter.’’ Every- 
thing was to be painted—forges, railway 
stations, church congregations, barnyards, 
the workrooms of manual laborers, casinos, 
studios, sleeping-cars, race-courses, crowded 
streets, the whole of humanity in all 
classes of society. The rude and offensive 
traits which the movement had at first, 
and which found expression in numbers of 
peasant, artisan and hospital pictures, 


112 


year or so later that 
he painted “‘At the Organ,”’ now in pos- 
session of the Metropolitan Museum. 
Passing from his religious pictures, Le- 
rolle’s favorite subjects are large land- 
scapes with few figures, and his effects of 
evening light are notable. In 1890 he 
went over to the Société Nationale des 
Beaux-Arts, of which he was one of the 
founders, and to which he sent some very 
remarkable portraits, historical paintings, 
nudes and landscapes. The technique of 
this artist is distinctly modern and per- 
sonal. His touch is skilled and sure, his 
color pleasing and carefully studied. 
Lerolle, in his later period, has developed 
a fondness for airy interiors of large di- 
mensions, often the broad expanses of the 
churches of the last century. In these he 
has not lost the diffused daylight of his 
early landscapes, but is enabled to place 
his figures in a clear, luminous silveriness 
and to continue his treatment of chiaro- 
scuro, and make an atmosphere felt. 


\ 











EEN Oe eS : ce Se OS ‘ Ae ee : REINO A 
HENRI LEROLLE (1848-) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 


Luke II, 16 Museum at Carcasonne. France 


CORREGGIO 


EWER authenticated facts con- 
4H cerning Antonio Allegri da 
| Correggio, contemporary of 
Leonardo da Vinci, Michel 
S Angelo and Raphael, have 
come down to us than are available of the 
life of any other painter of equal stature 
in the history of art. This is due to the 
comparative obscurity in which he lived, 
far from the great art centers of Venice, 
Florence and Rome, 
and this dearth of 
biographical material 
has given rise to 
many interesting leg- 
ends. There is the 
story, for instance, 
that when Titian vis- 
ited Parma, and Cor- 
reggio’s frescos were 
shown by the monks, 
who disparaged them 
as poor things which 
they were disposed to 





in the manger. 


Ts picture of the Nativity was sug- 

gested to Correggio by a passage in 
one of the apocryphal gospels which re- 
lates how St. Joseph, entering the stable 
at Bethlehem, saw the new-born Child 
shining with a _ supernatural radiance 
which lighted up the figure of the Ma- 
donna bending tenderly over the Infant 
To the left shepherds 
draw near, and in the background St. 
Joseph is seen tethering an ass. 


had been a childhood playmate, but his 
wife seems to have followed him back to 
Parma only after an interval of several 
years. She died on the eighth anniversary 
of their marriage, and Correggio returned 
to his native town, where he spent the re- 
maining years of his life, ‘‘resigned to the 
obscure monotony of village life and the 
limitations of easel-painting.’”’? Such a 
move stands in marked contrast to the 
crave for full exist- 
ence, the search for 
grand opportunities, 
the love of conflict, 
fame and favor that 
so essentially charac- 
terized artists of the 
Renaissance. 

Correggio died in 
1534, at the age of 
forty, apparently in 
full possession of his 
powers. His was a 


Above short life, yet three 


be rid of, the Vene- 
tian painter ex- 
claimed, ‘“‘Have a 
care what you do; if 
I were not Titian I 
should wish to be 
Allegri!’ Also there 
is his rebuke to the 
local dignitaries for 
their poor estimate of 


are angels “‘so exquisitely painted,” says 
Vasari, “‘that they seem rather to have 
been showered down from heaven than 
formed by the hand of the painter.” 
While the lighting of this picture has been 
extravagantly praised, its popularity is 
directly due, not so much to the lights as 
to the profoundly human interpretation of 
this most tender of all Biblical subjects. 


years longer than Ra- 
phael’s; and Raphael 
accomplished a far 
greater amount of 
work, not only as an 
artist but as a cour- 
tier, an architect, an 
antiquary and a 
teacher of the whole 
artist-generation just 


Correggio’s work in 

the Parma Cathedral, when he is reported 
to have declared, ‘‘Turn the cupola upside 
down and fill it with gold, and even that 
will not amount to its money’s worth.”’ 

In short, Correggio was all. but unknown 
to his contemporaries, and when his art 
was finally discovered the memory of the 
artist had almost faded from the minds of 
men, and no reliable biography existed. 
Even the date of his birth, thought to 
have been 1494, is problematical, though 
the place is known to have been the vil- 
lage of Correggio, near Modena, from 
which he takes his artist-name. At twenty- 
eight Correggio left his native village and 
took up a residence at Parma, where he 
spent four years painting his frescos in 
the cloisters of San Paolo, in the Church 
of San Giovanni and in the dome of the 
Cathedral. During a visit home in 1520 
Correggio married a young woman who 


114 


below him. 

Says John Addington Symonds: ‘“‘Gazing 
at his frescos makes one think of Correggio 
as a man listening to sweetest flute-playing, 
and translating phrase after phrase as 
they pass through his fancy into laughing 
faces, breezy tresses and rolling mists. 
Sometimes a grander cadence reaches his 
ear; and then St. Peter with the keys, or 
St. Augustine of the mighty brow, or the 
inspired eyes of St. John, take form be- 
neath his pencil. But the light airs re- 
turn, rose and lily faces bloom again for 
him among the clouds.... It is not in 
dignity or sublimity that Correggio excels, 
but in artless grace and tenderness.”’ 

His grave in the Correggio cemetery was 
marked by a wooden slab with merely 
‘““Antonius de Allegris, Pictor,’’ carved 
upon it, and it is said to have been a 
hundred years before even a few words cut 
in stone replaced this first curt record. 


HoLy NIGHT 





CORREGGIO (1494-1534) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Royal Gallery, Dresden 


RAPHAEL 


7 


NUCH of the glory that is 
Raphael’s is due to the fact 
that Pope Julius II, at the 

A, age of seventy, decided to 
such works 


embellish the Vatican with 
of art as it would ordinarily 
take a long lifetime to realize. Raphael, 
with Leonardo da Vinci and Michel An- 
gelo, was delegated to do an immense 


\ Fa 


friend of Raphael, permitted him to see it, 
to the end that he might study what 
Michel Angelo had done. The sight thus 
afforded him caused Raphael instantly to 
paint anew his picture of the prophet 
Isaiah ...and his manner was thereby 
inexpressibly ameliorated and enlarged, 
receiving thenceforth an obvious increase 
of majesty.” 


amount of it. 
numerous important 
works in Florence 
that Raphael, in the 
autumn of 1508, upon 
the recommendation, 
so Vasari says, of his 
fellow-citizen of Ur- 
bino, the architect 
Bramante, received 
from Pope Julius a 
summons to Rome, 
where already many 
of the most famous 
artists of Tuscany, 
Umbria and northern 
Italy were engaged in 
the service of that 


It was while engaged on 


HE Sistine Madonna,’”’ so cailed be- 

cause it was executed for the monks 
of the monastery of San Sisto, is said to 
be the last Madonna that Raphael painted. 
It depicts the holy Mother and Child 
descending out of highest heaven, wor- 
shipped by St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. 
The green altar hangings have been drawn 
back suddenly, disclosing ‘‘a vision that 
is for all time.’”’ In this picture Raphael 
united “his deepest thought, his pro- 
foundest insight, hiscompletest loveliness.” 
Lubke voices the consensus of opinion in 
saying that “it is the apex of all religious 
art, an enlightenment of the world.” 


While Raphael was unknown the Pope did 


not trouble about the 
subjects of the pic- 
tures in the hall of the 
Segnatura, nor how 
soon they were done; 
but when Julius found 
what manner of man 
he had to paint his 
walls for him, he was 
impatient for Ra- 
phael to decorate an 
adjoining room, 
known as the Stanza 
d’Eliodoro, with pic- 
tures illustrating the 
triumphs of _ the 
Church. He was en- 
gaged on the frescos 


pontiff. Michel An- 
gelo was about to be- 
gin his task of decorating the ceiling of 
the Sistine Chapel, the walls of which had 
already been painted by Signorelli, Peru- 
gino, Botticelli, Pinturicchio and others. 
Bramante was directing the building of 
St. Peter’s; and Raphael, being received 
with marked kindness by His Holiness, at 
once began decorating in fresco the cham- 
ber of the Segnatura, the subject being the 
celebrated ‘‘Disputa.’? Opposite it he 
painted a second monumental fresco, ‘‘The 
School of Athens,’”’ and these, with other 
pictures in a most elaborate decorative 
scheme, occupied Raphael for two and a 
half years. 

When, as Vasari says, Pope Julius handed 
over the first room to Raphael he was 
a comparatively unknown artist of prom- 
ise; when he finished it, he was acknowl- 
edged to have but one rival in Italy— 
Michel Angelo. Meanwhile the latter had 
made great strides with his work in the 
Sistine Chapel which, incidentally, was 
closed to the outside world while the mas- 
ter was at work. While Michel Angelo 
was absent from Rome, ‘‘Bramante, hav- 
ing a key to the Chapel and being the 


116 


of ‘““The Expulsion of 
Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem”’ 
and ‘‘The Miracle of Bolsena,’’ when his 
work was interrupted by the death of 
Pope Julius. His successor, Leo X, 
however, proved no less stanch a patron, 
and bade Raphael paint “‘The Retreat of 
Attila,” introducing the figure of the new 
pontiff as St. Leo arresting the barbarians 
in their invasion, and on the remaining 
wall of the room ‘‘The Deliverance of 
St. Peter,’ in allusion of the escape of 
Leo X from prison after the battle of 
Ravenna. 
With the exception of the Bolsena fresco, 
Raphael employed in the execution of 
these pictures a number of assistants, who 
worked, it is true, from his designs and 
under his direction, thus making possible 
the vast amount of work which was ac- 
complished during his short painting life of 
eighteen years, twelve of which were spent 
in Rome, but whose touch too often marred 
the creations of their master. 
In the year 1514, after the death of 
Bramante, the Pope appointed Raphael 
chief architect of St. Peter’s and the follow- 
ing year named him inspector of antiquities. 





SISTINE MADONNA 





SS seenhs Se St ide VN 


RAPHAEL (1483-1520) , Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Royal Gallery, Dresden 


QUINTEN MATSYS 


— 





¥ 


DN 


TARADITION relates that Quin- 

ten Matsys, the ‘‘smith of 

a Antwerp,’”’ became a painter 

y only because his sweetheart, 

the daughter of a painter, 

would not marry a blacksmith. The 

swinging brushwork and broad handling 

which he substituted for the small de- 

tailed touches of the earlier Flemish 

painters bear a certain relation to the 
vigor demanded by 
the work of a smithy. 
A realist to his finger 
tips was this Flemish 
master, and he was 
also. an_ originator. 
His handling of color 
was new, for, as Sir 
William Orpen writes, 
“instead of placing 
unbroken blues, reds, 
yellows, etc., in im- 
mediate juxtaposition, 
he marshals his hues 
into a uniform color- 
scheme.’’  Disliking 
smallness in every 
manifestation of life, 
he painted figures 
that still live on can- 
vas; and when the di- 
mensions of his pic- 

ture forbade the full-length he contented 

himself with half figures or even heads 


HE greatness of Quinten Matsys as a 

painter is strongly manifested in his 
“Adoration of the Magi.”’ 
as this Flemish master was of anything 
diminutive, he contents himself here with 
representing heads and part figures, with 
the single exception of the Child Jesus. 
In that exceptional figure is shown a 
striking characteristic of Matsys in his 
understanding of the child. His predeces- 
sors had painted infants as diminutive 
adults, but he painted them as real chil- 
dren. Notable of this picture also is that 
with the exception of the Madonna there is 
not a Dutch or Flemish face in the group. 
Note the richness of detail in the finely 
wrought gifts of the kings and the beauty 
and richness of their raiment. 


and busts rather than reduce his scale to’ 


miniature proportions. 

Antwerp and Louvain dispute one another 
in claiming to be the birthplace of Matsys. 
Its date was 1460 and, whether or not he 
was born in the present Belgian metropolis, 
it is certain that he died there in 1530. 
Prior to Matsys the human figure had 
only held a place equal in importance to 
landscape and architecture, but he subor- 
dinates these and gives his actors pre- 
eminence, endowing them with individu- 
ality, character and dramatic expression. 
Invariably his figures are well modelled, al- 
though they are sometimes lean and angu- 
lar: and his composition is not always 
harmonious. In his art are reflected all 
the opposing tendencies that existed in a 
metropolis such as Antwerp was in his 
day and age: a medley of civilizations, 
varied relations with distant countries, a 
time pregnant with events—all contrib- 


118 


uting to make a most interesting and 
kaleidoscopic spectacle. It is probable 
that Matsys became a painter of Biblical 
subjects as a result of association and en- 
vironment. Louvain was not only a city 
of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, but it was a city of churches, and 
to its university came students from far 
corners of the Catholic world. 

Beyond the fact that Matsys torsook 
hammer and anvil in 
favor of brush and 
palette at the age of 
twenty, and was en- 
rolled in the Guild of 
Saint Luke at Ant- 
werp eleven years lat- 
er, nothing is known 
as to who were his 
masters. Art anti- 
quarians have vainly 
searched the records 
for enlightenment on 
this point. There is 
a complete absence of 
any work signed by 
him during the period 
of his youth, and 
none can be in any 
way identified with 
him. Curiously 
enough, it is a puzzle 
to all the reviewers of his life that no works 
of Matsys done during his final years of 
residence in Antwerp are known to exist. 
It is as though this great painter had spent 
his last ten or fifteen years in idleness, or 
was engaged in some other occupation. 
His masterpiece is the great triptych in the 
Antwerp Museum, representing the “‘Burial 
of Christ,” flanked by the “‘Martyrdom of 
the Two Johns.” The action of this 
work is intense, and the color, though 
gorgeous, is well harmonized. 

Other works of Matsys are an ‘“‘Enthroned 
Virgin,” in the Berlin Gallery; ‘“The Virgin 
in Glory,’ at Petrograd; and two half- 
length figures of ‘‘Christ”? and the “Vir- 
gin,’”’ at Antwerp. 

Matsys was also a genre and portrait 
painter of strong individuality. He origi- 
nated character studies of burghers of 
Antwerp, representing money-changers or 
misers, in couples or groups, seated at tables. 
His few surviving portraits are vigorous, 
and show a skilful rendition of character. 


Contemptuous 


THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 





& 


QUINTEN MATSYS (1460-1530) Metropolitan Museum of Art 
Matt. IT, 11 ; New York City 


REMBRANDT 


CFAHAT Rembrandt was _ head- 


2) strong and more than a bit 





contemptuous of not only his 
critics but of his patrons is 
made evident by his biog- 
He was, as Dr. Muther has said, 


raphers. 
“the first artist who, in the modern sense, 
did not execute commissions, but expressed 


his own thoughts. The emotions which 
moved his inmost being were the only 
things which he ex- 
pressed on canvas. 
He does not seem to 
think that anyone is 
listening to him, but 
only speaks with him- 
self; he is anxious, not 
to be understood by 
others, but only to 
express his moods and 
feelings.” 

Elsewhere in _ this 
volume is noted the 
fact that ‘‘The Night 
Watch,” a_ univer- 
saily admitted mas- 
terpiece, greatly in- 
jured Rembrandt in the estimation of his 
contemporaries. This picture was done on 
commission for one Captain Banning Cocq 
and his fellows in a burgher military com- 
pany of Amsterdam. Instead of painting 
them clearly and recognizably as indi- 
viduals, Rembrandt painted the scene. 
Many members of the patrol are lost in 
shadow, as the painter intended; but those 
for whom he painted did not want a scene, 
they wanted to see themselves—and Rem- 
brandt in refusing them the satisfaction 
dealt a heavy blow to human vanity. 
Overwhelmed by his domestic sorrows— 
he lost his old mother, his young wife and 
two children within a period of two years— 
and no longer enjoying any studio patron- 
age to speak of, Rembrandt turned to 
nature for consolation. More and more of 
his time was spent in the country around 
Amsterdam. Practically all his landscapes 
were painted between 1640 and 1652. 
Many of his most exquisite landscape 
etchings were also executed during this 
period. The most famous of them all, 
“The Three Trees,’’ was done in 1643. 
Of another, known as ‘“‘Six’s Bridge,”’ 
dated 1645, tradition relates that it was 
etched against time for a wager at the 


THE Presentation in the Temple’ is dis- 

tinguished for the same marvellous 
lighting effect that was and is so discon- 
certing to the sober and practical Dutch 
mind that abhors shadows as nature does 
a vacuum. In this painting, the holy light 
is finely concentrated on the Babe, the 
Virgin and one or two other figures in 
the immediate foreground. But how im- 
measurably is the drama heightened by 
the mass of black-robed spectators seated 
and standing in the enveloping shadows 
of the dimly lighted temple! 


120 


country house of Rembrandt’s most loyal 
friend, Jan Six, while a servant was in 
quest of some mustard, needed for their 
lunch, in a neighboring village. 

Even while his: first wife was alive Rem- 
brandt seems frequently to have been in 
want of ready money, and when his 
mother left him a half-share in a mill at 
Leyden, in 1640, he at once sold it for 
cash to his brother and a nephew. Then 
in 1647, five years 
after his wife Saskia’s 
death, he became in- 
volved in litigation 
with her family, who 
wished to prevent the 
widower painter from 
being trustee of her 
estate. In so far as 
she had made a will 
in favor of their son, 
Titus, with an allow- 
ance for her sister, 
but with the stipula- 
tion that Rembrandt 
should not be legally 
bound to carry out its 
provisions, ‘“‘because she had confidence 
that he would behave in the matter in 
strict obedience to his conscience,”’ it is 
difficult to understand exactly how this 
litigation came to hasten his ruin. The 
fact remains, however, that between 1654 
and 1658 the painter was stripped of all 
the property he had accumulated up to the 
time of his bereavement, and that ‘‘for 
the rest of his life he was a sort of nomad, 
shifting his lodgings with uncomfortable 
frequency.” 

His second marriage to a domestic in his 
small household is said to have further 
offended aristocratic patrons; but she 
seems to have been a capable and devoted 
wife until her death, which is supposed to 
have occurred about 1669. 

His biographers are generally agreed that 
money, or the want of it, was not a thing 
to profoundly trouble or more than incon- 
venience a philosophic dreamer like Rem- 
brandt. If he had money, he spent it 
royally; otherwise he went without. The 
death of this greatest man that Holland 
ever gave to the world was virtually un- 
noticed, and only the bare fact of his 
burial in the Werter-Kerk of Amsterdam is 
attested by an official two-line entry. 


THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE 





REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606-1669) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Luke II, 25 Mauritshuis, The Hague 


LEONARDO DA VINCI 


7, FAICCASIONALLY,”’ says the 
Italian historian Vasari, 
“beauty, grace and ability are 

DN Ye so represented in a single indi- 
vidual, that whatever he does, 

every action is so divine that he outdis- 
tances all other men, and clearly displays 
how his genius is more than the acquire- 
ment of human art. Men saw this in 


enumerated his talents and capabilities. 
After dwelling on his capacity as a military 
engineer and his ability to construct can- 
nons and _ scaling-ladders, mortars and 
engines of fair and useful design, he con- 
cludes: ‘‘In time of peace, I believe I can 
equal any one in architecture, in con- 
structing public and private buildings, and 


Leonardo da Vinci, whose personal beauty 


and grace cannot be 
exaggerated, whose 
abilities were so ex- 
traordinary that he 
could readily solve 
every difficulty that 
presented itself.”’ 

Leonardo was born in 
1452, at Vinci, a forti- 
fied town located be- 
tween Florence and 
Pisa, Italy. He was 
the natural son of 
Ser Piero Antonio da 
Vinci, a notary who 
soon established him- 
self in Florence and 
enjoyed a_ lucrative 
practice. There Leo- 
nardo lived until he 
was twenty-four years 


I NTO the figures of St. Anne and the 

Virgin in this picture Leonardo da 
Vinci has put all his genius, and in them 
the interest of the picture centers. One 
is the mother of the other; but Leonardo 
chose to represent them both as young 
with the same youth, and beautiful with 
the same haunting beauty. Their harmony 
is exquisite. They are enchantresses, 
dowered with a strange, ghostly loveliness 
that seems made all of light and shade— 
pure spirit, with no admixture of human 
clay. The less successful figure of the 
Christ Child may possibly have been 
painted by a pupil or by an imitator; it is 
unfinished, but there are weaknesses of 
execution in the small figure that cannot 
be attributed to Leonardo. 


conducting water 
I can execute sculpture, 


in from one place 
to another. 
whether in marble, 
bronze or terra cotta; 
and in painting I can 
do as much as any 
other, be he who he 
may. Further, I 
could engage to exe- 
cute the bronze horse 
in eternal memory of 
your father and the 
illustrious house of 
Sforza.”’ 

Recognizing the abil- 
ity of the young 
Florentine, Lodovico 
at once commissioned 
Leonardo to execute 
the equestrian statue. 
Endless preparations 
were made for it, and 
Leonardo is said to 


of age, having at the 

age of fifteen entered the studio of Andrea 
Verocchio. This representative of the 
scientific school of Florentine artists was 
well fitted to develop his peculiar genius. 
It was while there that Leonardo was di- 
rected to paint one of the angels in a pic- 
ture of ‘St. John Baptizing Christ.” His 
angel so far surpassed the other figures in 
beauty that his master, though filled with 
admiration of his pupil, was so chagrined 
with himself that he is said to have quit 
painting and to have devoted the rest of 
his life to sculpture. 

Dr. Richter tells us that when Leonardo 
was thirty years old he was sent to Milan 
by Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘‘to bear a silver 
lute to his friend Lodovico Sforza.’ This 
Lodovico Sforza had decided to raise a 
colossal statue in memory of his father, 
the famous Duke Francesco, and it is 
probable that Lorenzo recommended Leo- 
nardo to do the work. In any event 
Leonardo wrote Duke Lodovico a letter in 
which he offered his services and proudly 


122 


have spent. several 
years studying the structure and anatomy 
of the horse. 
Five years after it was begun the model 
was sufficiently advanced to be unveiled. 
It was hailed as one of the wonders of the 
age, was twenty-six feet high, and when 
cast in bronze was expected to weigh 
200,000 pounds. Unfortunately, Lodovico 
suffered reverses and the statue was never 
cast. 
Returning from Milan to Florence Leo- 
nardo was commissioned to paint an altar- 
piece for the Church of the Annunziata. 
“For a long time,’”’ says Vasari, “he ap- 
peared to do nothing at all, but at length 
produced a cartoon with the Madonna, 
St. Anne and the Christ, a work which not 
only filled all the artists with admiration, 
but brought a continuous procession of 
people to the hall in the convent where it 
was exhibited.” It was this composi- 
tion that Leonardo afterwards repeated in 
oils for Francis I of France, and which is 
now in the Louvre. 


ST. ANNE, THE VIRGIN, AND CHRIST CHILD 





LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
' j Louvre, Paris 


MURILLO 


WELLING on the statement 
that ‘‘to admire one must un- 
derstand, and what the great 
majority of people fully under- 
stand is likely to be mediocre,”’ 
critics of the work of the Spanish master, 
Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, are disposed 
to minimize his genius in direct proportion 
to his popularity. At the same time, as 
Lucien Solvay admits, “‘his work has in it 


XJ] 





<—_ 


Velasquez was to the Spanish nobility.’ 
Now and then, as in his great canvas, 
“St. Elizabeth of Hungary Healing the 
Sick,’’ Murillo came down out of the 
clouds. In it, writes Theophile Gautier, 
“the artist takes us into the most thorough- 
going reality. Instead of angels we have 
lepers; but Christian art, like Christian 
charity, feels no disgust at the spectacle. 
Everything is elevated and ennobled, and 


a true fundamental 
value; for widespread 
popular admiration, 
no matter how super- 
ficial, has always 
some just basis.’’ The 
power of Murillo de- 
rives from the facts 
that he was one of 
the most fertile and 
industrious painters 
of his time, and that 
he had an engaging 
personality which he 
was able to get into 
his canvases. 

Doubtless it would 
have been better for 
his fame if he had 


y | N painting this picture of “‘St. John and 

the Lamb,” Murillo was inspired by 
the words of John the Baptist, quoted by 
the Apostle John: “Behold the Lamb of 
God, which taketh away the sin of the 
world.”’ It is done in his softest and 
most suave style, in which outlines are 
lost in the delicate confusion of graduated 
colors. The mysterious vaporous effect 
thus obtained has come to be called 
vaporoso. This picture reflects the senti- 
mentality of Murillo that so strongly ap- 
pealed to the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries as to make him considered for 
nearly two hundred years the foremost of 
all the great Spanish painters. 


from this revolting 
theme has been cre- 
ated a masterpiece.”’ 
In November, 1874, 
it was discovered that 
the largest painting 
Murilloeverexecuted, 
“The Vision of St. 
Anthony,” in the Ca- 
thedral of Seville, had 
been mutilated by 
cutting out the figure 
of St. Anthony. The 
Spanish Government 
sent photographs of 
the mutilation to its 
foreign envoys and 
consuls, with instruc- 
tions to aid in the 


painted fewer Con- 
ceptions and Holy Families, with their 
swarms of cherubic angels and their infant 
Christs, and taken more pains with those 
he did paint. He turned out cherubs with 
the regularity of a factory—all equally 
fetching, with great black eyes and blond 
hair and rosy mouths, as if from the same 
mould. 

In singular contrast to these legions of 
angels and processions of Madonnas are 
the begging children of the Seville streets 
who are prominent in so many of his most 
famous pictures. They will plead loudly 
for his glory before the tribunal of pos- 
terity. In painting them, Murillo must 
have felt his native Spanish instincts re- 
vived and quickened. ‘‘It seems as though 
it were a healthy relief to him thus to 
give play to the natural blood in his veins, 
after having so constantly devoted himself 
to painting supernatural dreams; and if he 
had not bent his imagination so exclusively 
to heavenly visions, and had consecrated 
himself to the study of his kind, as did 
Velasquez, he would conceivably have been 
to the plain folk of Spain the painter that 


124 


search for the crimi- 
nal. Presently a Spaniard turned up in 
New York with an authentic Murillo, de- 
scribed as a family heirloom, which he 
offered to a well-known art dealer. It 
proved to be the stolen fragment, tacked 
to a new American stretcher, and much 
damaged by having been kept rolled too 
tightly. The dealer bought the picture for 
$250 and notified the Spanish consul, who 
had the seller arrested. Later the frag- 
ment was repaired, and the picture re- 
stored to its place in the Cathedral of 
Seville, with public festivities. In his an- 
nals of the artists of Spain, William Stir- 
ling ranks Murillo second only to the 
greatest masters of Italy, as a religious 
painter. ‘In ideal grace of thought and 
in force and perfection of style he yields, 
as all later artists must yield, to that 
constellation of genius of which Raphael 
was the principal star. But his pencil was 
endowed with a power of touching re- 
ligious sympathies and awakening tender 
emotions which belonged to none of the 
Italian painters of the seventeenth cen- 
tury.” 


THE INFANT SL. JOHN 





ie. 
London 


Braun & Ci 


1 Gallery, 


Courtesy Maison Ad 


MURILLO (1617-1682) 


Nationa 


FRA ANGELICO 


ICHEL ANGELO, that lover 
of muscular construction and 
heroic nudity, said of Fra 
Angelico’s‘‘Flight into Egypt’”’ 
and its companion panels, 

which individually measure hardly more 
than a foot square, but each of which might 
be enlarged to colossal size and worthily 
decorate a church wall, ‘‘Surely the good 
monk visited Paradise and was allowed to 
choose his models 


7 
p 


—=——P © —— 


was an exception that proved the rule. 
As the study of the nude body was for- 
bidden to a monk, he concentrated all his 
feeling for physical beauty, all his capacity 
for dramatic expression, on the faces of 
his saints and angels, and became a unique 
exponent of religious sentiment. Though 
his chief glory is a fervor of conviction 
which passes above and beyond technique, 
yet, as E. H. Blashfield says, in technique 
also he sets a worthy 
example; and he owes 


there.’ Ranking 
among the great lead- 
ers of the Florentine 
Renaissance, in Fra 
Angelico the artist 
and the saint worked 
in such perfect har- 
mony that we are 
rarely conscious of 
any effort on the part 
of the latter to domi- 
nate the former. And 
it is in this fact that 
one of the greatest 
secrets of his success 
lies. He painted the 
kind of subjects that 
he liked best to paint, 
and, as John Adding- 
ton Symonds _ ob- 


IME has not tarnished the ideal fresh- 

ness of Fra Angelico’s “Flight into 
Egypt.” It is a diminutive panel—one of 
a series of thirty-five scenes from the life 
of Christ—painted to decorate the doors 
of the presses which held the silver-plate 
of the Church of the Annunziata, Florence. 
This 15-inch-square panel is distinguished 
from its companions in the series by rea- 
son of the fact that the good Fra is known 
to have painted it himself, while many of 
the other panels were done by his pupils. 
The story it tells of the earliest pilgrimage 
in the life of Christ is simple and direct. 
The faces of the Virgin and Joseph in this 
picture are painted with a beauty and se- 
renity to which even Fra Angelico does not 
attain in any other work. 


to his composition, as 
well as to his convic- 
tion, the fact that he 
charms at once the 
ignorant, the devotee, 
the dilettante and the 
trained artist. 

A secret of his artistic 
power is that, as the 
Italian critic, I. B. 
Supino, states, ‘‘He 
put into his work the 
flame of an _ over- 
powering passion; un- 
der his touch features 
were beautiful and 
figures animated with 
a new mystic grace. 
His forms are often, 
it is true, conven- 


serves, ‘‘So essential a 

part of him were his artistic qualities that 
the fervor of his religious emotion scarcely 
ever marred the decorative character of 
his work.”’ 

Vasari, whose description of Fra Angelico 
has impressed itself upon a dozen genera- 
tions of readers, calls him a primary artist 
who happened to be a saint. 

To say, as some do, that Fra Angelico was 
more interested in the matter of his theme 
than in its representation is only to say 
what is true of every great Florentine 
painter of the Renaissance. In Venice 
there was a love of painting for its own 
sake. The great Florentines, on the other 
hand, were very much more than painters. 
They were sculptors, poets, men of science, 
theologians, archaeologists and humanists; 
and at times their desire to record mere 
facts of the natural world, or to teach some 
theological or philosophical dogma, pre- 
dominated over all purely artistic impulses. 
Fra Angelico, in whom we have observed 
the artist and saint in perfect accord, 


tional, and there is a certain sameness in 
his heads, with their large oval counte- 
nances; his small eyes, outlined around the 
upper arch of the eyebrow, with black 
spots for pupils, sometimes lack expression; 
his mouths are always drawn small, with 
a thickening of the lips in the center, and 
the corners strongly accentuated; the color 
of his faces is either too pink or too yellow; 
the folds of his robes (especially of the lower 
limbs) fall straight and, in the representa- 
tions of the seated Virgin, expand on the 
ground as if to form the foot of a chalice. 
But in his frescos these faults of conven- 
tional manner almost entirely disappear, 
giving place to freer drawing, more lifelike 
expression and acharacterof greater power.” 
Though Fra Angelico completed the cycle 
of purely supernatural art, says Cosmo 


~ Monkhouse, he also led the way to that 


126 


wonderful fusion of the supernatural and 
natural in which Italian art culminated a 
century later. _He was the last disciple of 
Giotto, the first harbinger of Raphael. 


THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 





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FRA ANGELICO (1387-1455) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. I. 13 Academy, Florence 


RUBENS 


AINTER, diplomatist, scholar 
and confidant of rulers and 
statesmen, Peter Paul Ru- 
bens was not only the most 
prolific painter but one of the 
most picturesque figures in European his- 
tory. He was born in 1577, one year after 
the death of Titian. Political complica- 
tions had driven his father from Antwerp, 


\y 






from his designs. The truth is he estab- 
lished a picture-factory at Antwerp, and 
not only engaged assistants to help him on 
gigantic decorations for churches and 
palaces, but also farmed out commissions 
for easel-pictures, landscapes and por- 
traits. Yet, as Sir William Orpen ob- 
serves, ‘‘all is so controlled by the master- 
hand that to any but an expert the whole 


so the boy spent his early childhood in 


exile. His penchant 
for painting mani- 
fested itself while he 
was yet a lad and he 
was apprenticed to 
Adam van Noort, a 
celebrated Flemish 
artist, and “‘such was 
his precocity that it 
was easy to perceive 
that the intention of 
nature was for him 
to become a great 
painter.”’ 

Fired with enthusi- 
asm for Italian art, 
Rubens went to Ven- 
ice shortly after com- 
ing of age and some 


THE Return from Egypt’ is considered 

among the foremost masterpieces deal- 
ing with Biblical subjects, painted by 
Peter Paul Rubens. He drew strongly on 
his imagination in painting this picture, 
which has been called “‘a framed poem.” 
With what trust the Child, holding Mary’s 
hand, half leads her and is half guided by 
Joseph, while the Father of Heaven looks 
down from a cloud! Note the resemblance 
of mother and child. The model for both 
was his second -wife Helena Fourment. 
She was sixteen and he fifty-three when 
they were married and her face appears 
in almost every canvas painted after that 
time, often several times in one picture. 


appears to be the work of one man.” 


A 
story is told that the 
Dean of Malines Ca- 
thedral was furious 
when, having ordered 
a ‘Last Supper” from 
Rubens, a young 
apprentice arrived 
to begin the work. 
Later on “the great 
man appeared with 
his fine presence and 
the urbane manner 
that was a bulwark 
against offence or mis- 
appreciation. As Ru- 
bens corrected the 
work, enlivened the 
color or the action of 
the figures, and swept 


copies he made of 
paintings by Titian 
and Veronese attract- 
ed the attention of the Duke of Mantua, 
into whose service he entered and by 
whom, in 1603, he was sent on a mission 
with presents of horses and pictures to 
Philip III of Spain. The death of his 
mother recalled him to Antwerp where we 
soon hear of him as Court Painter to the 
Stadtholders of Flanders. 

Evidently he prospered, for he married in 
1609 and the following year ‘‘designed an 
imposing residence in the Italian style, and 
had it built on what is now the Rue de 
Rubens.”” There he founded the School 
of Antwerp, and the ensuing ten or twelve 
years were the most tranquil and probably 
the happiest in the life of Rubens. During 
this period he executed the works on which 
his fame most firmly rests, notably his 
supreme masterpiece, ““The Descent from 
the Cross,’’ now in the Antwerp Cathedral. 
Rubens had such an extraordinary number 
of collaborators that it often is difficult to 
distinguish works of his own from those 
executed by artists he employed to work 


You will find the same face on page 187 
in “The Descent from the Cross.” 


128 


the whole composi- 
tion towards a unity 
of effect, the church- 
man acknowledged the wisdom of the 
master, and admitted that the money of 
the chapter had been safely invested.” 
The fame of Rubens spread over Europe, 
and in 1622 he was summoned to Paris 
by the Queen-Mother, Marie de’ Medici, 
to decorate her favorite Luxembourg Pal- 
ace. The great series of wall-paintings 
resulting from this commission are now a 
glory of the Louvre. 

An important event in art history was the 
meeting in Spain between Rubens, who 
was on a special embassage to the Spanish 
Court, and Velasquez. Although Rubens— 
was fifty-two and Velasquez only thirty, 
the two became great friends and the 
Spanish painter was considerably influ- 
enced by the Flemish master. 

Politically the great result of his stay in 
Spain was that Philip IV made Rubens 
his ambassador to Charles I of England, 
where he “‘not only arranged terms of peace 
between England and Spain, but gave a 
new direction to English painting.”’ 


THE RETURN FROM EGYPT 





PETER PAUL RUBENS (1577-1640) Metropolitan Museum of Art 
Matt. III, 19 New York City 


JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS 


OT long before his election to 
4 the presidency of the Royal 
H Academy, Sir John Everett 
Millais was walking with a 
friend in Kensington Gardens, 





SS 


He suddenly stood still by the 


London. 
small Round Pond and said: “How ex- 
traordinary it is to think that I once fished 
for sticklebacks in this very pond, and 
now here I am a great man, a baronet, 


did. No less a champion than John Rus- 
kin, whose divorced wife eventually be- 
came Lady Millais, picked up the gage. 
He was only the first in a long line of cele- 
brated critics and connoisseurs to lavish 
praise upon this canvas. Soon public 
appreciation was awakened; and today art 
authorities are almost unanimous in hold- 
ing that this is one of Millais’ masterpieces 
and one of the world’s great pictures. 


with a fine house, 
plenty of money, and 
everything my heart 
could desire.’”” And 
he walked on gaily. 
This speech describes 
Millais—his history, 
his character, even 
his art, for, as Sizer- 
anne observes, in his 
studies of English 
contemporary art, 
they all belong to a 
happy man. At the 
same time, Miuillais, 
although never really 
acquainted with ad- 
versity, had a severe 
struggle to obtain rec- 
ognition. The real 
title of the picture 
opposite, for instance, 


C FRIST in the House of His Parents’’ 

is the second picture painted and 
exhibited by Millais after the formation 
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It 
provoked an outcry even louder than had 
attended the exhibition of his ‘Lorenzo 
and Isabella’ the year before. Most 
offence was taken at the figure of Mary 
with a yellow kerchief over her head and 
dressed like the wife of a small London 
merchant. The Child Jesus is standing 
in front of the bench holding his injured 
hand, while the little St. John is fetching 
a vessel of water. Mary is kneeling 
beside the Christ Child, trying to console 
Him, and Joseph is leaning over to see 
the wounded hand. At the back is the 
aged St. Anne trying to draw from the 
board the nail that has caused the injury. 


Millais was a preco- 
cious youth. He was 
English born, but of 
French descent, the 
date of his birth being 
1829 and the place 
Southampton. It is 
said that he could 
trace his ancestry to 
the family tree of 
Jean Francois Millet, 
the famous French 
peasant painter. He 
was the youngest pu- 
pil ever entered at 
the Royal Academy, 
being only’ eleven 
years old at the time. 
Sketches are in ex- 
istence, made by him 
at the age of nine, 
that are astonishing 


is ‘Christ: “mn° ithe 
House of His Par- 
ents,”’ but when it was first hung in the 
Royal Academy, in 1850, the artist being 
only twenty-one years old, it was con- 
temptuously called ‘‘The Carpenter’sShop.’’ 
Among its many denouncers was the novel- 
ist Charles Dickens, then at the pinnacle 
of his fame. Imbued with the concepts 
of art then current, Dickens penned a 
violent attack upon the picture: ‘‘In the 
foreground of the carpenter’s shop is a 
hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired 
boy in a nightgown, who appears to have 
received a poke in the hand from the stick 
of another boy with whom he had been 
playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be 
holding it up for the contemplation of a 
kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness 
that . . . she would stand out from the rest 
of the company as a monster in the vilest 
cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop 
in England.”’ 


Fortunately, not everyone felt as Dickens 


130 


things for a child of 
that age to have done. 
At seventeen he exhibited his first picture, 
which was praised by some of the critics 
as the best thing in the exhibition. At 
nineteen he made the acquaintance of two 
other remarkable young men—Dante Ga- 
briel Rossetti and Holman Hunt—and with 
them formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 
hood which, for all of many admirable 
qualities, produced some decidedly queer, 
not to say grotesque work. Of the trio, 
Millais was the only thoroughly endowed 
artist. Rossetti was a poet who painted, 
and Hunt was a doctrinaire who expressed 
his convictions in paint. 

Millais is one of the very few artists of 
note who never really had to struggle for 
a living: but the end of his life was pa- 
thetic. He had been knighted in 1885, and 
eleven years later was elected to the 
presidency of the Royal Academy. He 
died suddenly, in 1896, having been in 
office less than six months. 


ry 


SIR 


JOHN 


MILLAIS 





Beers Collection 


BERNARDINO LUINI 


— 


y, 


az 


HE Raphael of Lombardy,”’ as 
Bernardino Luini has _ been 

Nig called, was one of the most 
y, charming as well as most pro- 

lific artists of the great Re- 
naissance period. “If he did not equal 
Leonardo da Vinci in consummate genius,”’ 
writes Canon Farrar, ‘“‘he surpassed him 
not only in the multitude of his pictures, 
but also in the winning loveliness, in the 





DN 


folding where Luini was working, and 
missing his footing, or as some say, im- 
pelled by the artist, impatient perhaps of 
criticism, fell over backward and was 
killed. Luini fled the city and found refuge 
with the head of the powerful Pelucca 
family at Monza, where he spent two years 
decorating the Casa Pelucca and, inci- 
dentally, winning the heart of Laura, the 
beautiful daughter of the house, over many 


pure and holy spirit 
ofvpeace, that 
breathes through 
them all.”’ Yet, of 
the life of no other 
equally eminent 
painter is so little 
known. This is due 
largely to the silence 
of Vasari regarding 
Luini, even whose 
mame, curiously 
enough, he misspells 
in his slight reference 
to one of the most 
accomplished painters 
of all time. 

Of his works a similar 


UINT’S “Christ Disputing with the 

Doctors’? is regarded by no less a 
churchman and connoisseur than Canon 
Farrar as “one of the loveliest frescos in 
existence.” The figure of Christ is full of 
grace and gentle authority. He is stand- 
ing in animated discourse in a marble 
recess, and though of pensive mien, His 
face and attitude radiate assurance. The 
colors, as in all of Luint’s pictures, are 
tender and harmoniously blended. The 
artist has pictured himself at the right as 
one of the Rabbis, a venerable figure with 
white hair and beard, and having an ex- 
pression of mild and self-respecting dignity. 


more eligible suitors. 
Two of these fought 
a duel, in which one 
participant, who was 
seconded by Luini, 
was slain and Luini 
barely escaped with 
his life. | However, 
“no persuasion could 
induce Laura Pelucca 
to look with favor 
upon the slayer; and 
as she insisted upon 
her preference for the 
painter, her parents 
surreptitiously placed 
her in a convent at 
Lugano, where, many 


ignorance has until 

recently prevailed, owing perhaps to the 
fact that his greatest achievement—his 
frescos—are located in small Italian towns 
far from the highways of travel; and also 
because a great many of his easel-pictures, 
scattered throughout the principal galleries 
of Europe, have been wrongly attributed to 
Leonardo da Vinci, by whom Luini was 
strongly influenced at one period of his 
career. Of late, however, the researches 
of Morelli, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Brun 
and others, in addition to Ruskin, have re- 
accorded Luini the position in the history 
of art that the grace and power of his work 
entitled him to hold. 

According to a contemporary, Father 
Sebastian Resta, who states that he knew 
him personally, Luini was a pupil of 
Stefano Scotto, a Milanese painter, and 
never, as has been supposed, studied under 
Leonardo. Scenes of violence seem to 
have marked his career, beginning with 
his important frescos done for the Church 
of San Giorgio al Palazzo in Milan. While 
putting the final touches to them, he was 
visited by the parish priest, who, in order 
to get a closer view, mounted the scaf- 


132 


years later, she was 
found by Luini while he was working on 
his famous ‘Crucifixion’ in the church of 
that town.” In the Brera Gallery at 
Milan is a fine “Burial of St. Catherine,”’ 
in which, according to tradition, Luini gave 
to the face of the saint the features of Laura 
Pelucca. 
The story goes that Luini had fled from 
Milan because he had killed a man in 
self-defence; and, seeking refuge in the 
pilgrimage church at Saronno, was com- 
pelled by the monks to paint a series of 
frescos including his ‘“‘Christ Disputing with 
the Doctors,’’ in return for their protection. 
He was paid about thirty cents a day, 
besides a daily portion of food and wine; and 
so well satisfied was he with this remunera- 
tion that he gratuitously painted for them 
“The Nativity” on the cloister wall. ‘‘’Tis 
almost a pity,’’ said the good monks, “‘that 
Bernardino did not murder more men, 
that we might have received from him 
much more gifts.”’ 
At the top of his fame, in the full force of his 
artistic power, Luini suddenly disappeared. 
The date of his death and his burial place 
are alike unknown. 


‘CHRIST DISPUTING WITH THE DOCTORS 


on 





ee 


BERNARDINO LUINI (14—, 15—) Santuario della Vergine, Saranno 
Luke II, 43 


ANDREA DEL SARTO 







AURIOUSLY, it was the mis- 
Q4 fortune of Andrea del Sarto, or 
Andrea d’Agnolo, as he gener- 
ally signs himself, to be called 
the ‘‘faultless painter,’’ which 
is praise that implies a want of ardor, and 
touches the core of his shortcomings. 
Over and over he is described as the painter 
who stops just short of perfect fulfilment, 
but he ranks high among his contempo- 
raries, Leonardo da 

Vinci, Michel Angelo S 
and Raphael. 

Andrea was the son 
of a tailor named 


ELDOM if ever again did Andrea del 
Sarto rise to the poetic heights he 
attained in his “St. John the Baptist.” 
St. John’s features distinctly resemble 


‘‘being more anxious to profit by his gains 
than to see him again.’”’ Her entreaties 
prevailed, and he obtained royal leave to 
return to Florence and take his wife to 
Paris. Instead of doing the latter he re- 
mained in Florence and “spent the money 
which Francis I had given him to pur- 
chase works of art for his palace at Fon- 
tainebleau, in buying land and building a 
house near the Annunziata.”’ 

In spite of his indus- 
try and of his great 
reputation, Andrea 
del Sarto never at- 
tained a position com- 


Agnolo (whence his 
appellation del Sarto, 
for Andrea del Sarto 
merely means “the 
tailor’s Andrew’’) and 
when barely of age 
painted seven frescos 
from the life of St. 
Philip Benizzi in the 
Servite Church of the 
Annunziata in Flor- 
ence for the sum of 
ten florins apiece. 


those of the painter's wife, Lucrezia, who 
so often sat as his model. Indeed, as 
Vasari says, “If Andrea took a model 
from any other face there was always a 
resemblance to hers in the painting, not 
only because he had this woman con- 
stantly before him and depicted her so 
frequently, but, what is more, because he 
had her lineaments engraven on his heart.” 
In widowhood, her pride was to have 
been the wife of “‘the faultless painter.” 


mensurate to his rare 
talents. During the 
siege of Florence he 
suffered many priva- 
tions, and welcomed 
a commission to paint 
on the walls of the 
Podesta palace the 
effigies of some rebels 
who had been exe- 
cuted as traitors. Pro- 
fessing to be ashamed 
of the task, he an- 


They are marvellous productions for so 
young an artist and remain his most 
charming and attractive fresco work. Di- 
rectly after doing these masterpieces he 
executed a series of chiaroscuro subjects 
from the life of John the Baptist in the 
cloisters of the Scalzo or Barefooted 
Friars, which reveal his remarkable genius 
at its peak. 

Of his wife, who posed for so many of his 
pictures and who was the widow of a 
Florentine hatter, Vasari records that 
“ther violent and overbearing temper drove 
away his favorite pupil, and several of his 
best apprentices, while her extravagance 
involved him in constant difficulties. He 
soon found that he had not only his wife 
but her father and sisters to keep, com- 
pelling him to toil incessantly and to 
neglect his own parents,’ who, if we are 
to believe Vasari, ‘‘died in miserable 
poverty.” 

At thirty-two Andrea found a generous 
patron in King Francis I of France, but 
while he was enjoying the change from the 
narrowness and poverty of his Florentine 
life to the splendor of the French court 
his wife became impatient for his return— 


134 


nounced that one of his apprentices would 
do it, but really did it himself, going to 
and fro by night, and hiding behind a 
screen when at work. 

His life appears to have been a triple 
tragedy from the handicap of his marriage, 
from his own weakness of character and 
from the fact, as the Messrs. Blashfield 
point out, that “he came just too soon or 
too late, at a time when the greatest re- 
wards fell naturally to three men who 
possessed the one high spiritual quality 
denied to Andrea—the inspiration of con- 
viction.’”’ Nevertheless, no student of his 
work at its best can escape the potency 
of his spell. 

He fell a victim to the plague which fol- 
lowed the sacking of Florence by the 
Spaniards in 1531, and passed away at 
forty-five, deserted even by his wife who 
fled in terror from the house and left him 
to die alone. She survived him forty years. 
One day in 1570, it is said, an aged woman 
stopped in the court of the Annunziata to 
watch an artist copying Andrea del Sarto’s 
“Birth of the Virgin.’”? She told him that 
it was her portrait, and that she was the 
widow of the artist who painted the fresco. 


ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST 





Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 


ANDREA DEL SARTO (1486-1531) 
Pitti Gallery, Florence 


GIOVANNI BELLINI 


ONG-LIVED as have been 
many master painters, Gio- 
vanni Bellini, whom Morelli 
reckons the greatest painter of 
Northern Italy in the fifteenth 
and whom the Blashfields and 





century, 
A. A. Hopkins call a ‘“‘master of masters,”’ 
has the distinction of having been a better 
painter in- his eighties than he was in the 


recorded that the Grand Turk was so 
impressed by a portrait of himself painted 
by Gentile as to ‘“‘scarcely conceive that 
a mere mortal should have the divinity in 
himself to paint such a likeness.”’ 

Meanwhile Giovanni began his monu- 
mental work in Venice, which was to oc- 
cupy the greater part of his long life and 
on which, incidentally, he was intermit- 


prime of life. 
develop that, al- 
though he _ began 
painting at an excep- 
tionally early age, his 
masterpieces were all 
the work of his later 


years. 
Giovanni and his less 
famous, but older, 


brother, Gentile, were 
sons of a Venetian 
artist, Jacopo Bellini, 
who was their first 
teacher, but whom 
they so soon. sur- 
passed that he mag- 
nanimously  encour- 
aged them ‘“‘to do as 
did the Tuscans, who 
were perpetually 
striving among them- 


So slowly, indeed. did he 


GIOVANNI BELLINI was past seventy 

when he painted “The Baptism of 
Christ,’ one of the finest examples of his 
art, the greater part of which has perished. 
Enough remains, however, to justify his 
fame as the foremost painter of his time 
in Venice. It is a curious coincidence that 
Giovanni first began to paint in oil and 
first began to be recognized as a master 
painter simultaneously when he was ap- 
proaching or shortly past fifty. Bellini 


has taken some liberty with scriptural 


text in this work, introducing, for instance, 
three women witnesses to the baptism. 
Again, in showing the Father of Heaven 
surrounded by cloud-embedded cherubs, 
he omits “the spirit of God descending 
like a dove’’ and lighting on the ‘‘beloved 


tently assisted by his brother. 


Unfortu- 
nately these works 
were destroyed by fire 
in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, but Vasari re- 
cords that they dis- 
played ‘the golden 
touch possessed by 
every Venetian paint- 
er of importance”’ and 
“it is the absence in 
Giovanni of all strain- 
ing either for expres- 
sion or technical 
handling . . . his un- 
ruffled, quiet perfec- 
tion that makes him 
a master of masters.”’ 
From his twenty-sec- 
ond year on, that is, 
from 1450 until his 
latest known works 


selves to carry off the 
palm of distinction 
by outstripping each 
other.’’ The paternal ambition was realized. 
Born in Venice about the year 1428, 
Giovanni when hardly more than a lad 
painted a picture of the dead Christ for 
the Order of Barefooted Friars, which, 
Vasari notes, was so greatly coveted by 
Louis XI of France that “‘the friars were 
reluctantly compelled to gratify him.” 
Not long after several portraits by this 
master were taken into Turkey by an 
ambassador, and presented to the Grand 
Turk, ‘‘whose astonishment and admira- 
tion were such that, although pictures are 
prohibited by the Mohametan law, he 
accepted them with great good will and 
asked that the master of the work should be 
sent to him.”’ 

Loath to part with Giovanni, the Venetian 
Senate commissioned him to decorate the 
Hall of the Grand Council, while his 
brother made the journey to Turkey in 
his place. To the credit of the latter, it is 


Son.” 


It is a masterpiece of Italian art. 


of 1513 and 1514, 
Giovanni Bellini is in 
continual growth, an 
unceasing evolution, so that no less a 
contemporary than Albrecht Durer, in 
1506, pronounced him ‘‘the best artist in 
Venice.”’ Thus Durer, sojourning in 
Venice, writes to a friend in Germany: 
“Giovanni Bellini has praised me much, be- 
fore many noble people. He would much 
like to have something of mine, and came 
himself to me and begged me to do some- 
thing for him and he would pay me well. 
And everyone says what an upright man 
he is. I am much attached to him. He 
is very old, but still the best in painting.” 
Giovanni’s greatest work having perished 
in the fires that twice swept the Ducal 
Palace in Venice, in 1574 and 1577, that 
which survives is principally ‘‘the things 
he did to live by, or to lay up money.”’ 
As State painter to the Republic, writes 
Richter, ‘‘it fell to Giovanni to paint the 
official portraits of the Doges,’’ of whom 
eleven held office during his eighty-six years. 


136 . 





THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST 





Sa SR rele Z 


GIOVANNI BELLINI (1428-1515) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. III, 16, Luke III, 21 Church of Santa Corona, Vicenza 


ARY SCHEFFER 


ET, YZINE April day in 1813 a lad 
y named Ary (short for Ariel) 
Scheffer bounded up the stairs 

DN Yi: of a studio-home in Paris and 
tossed into his mother’s lap 

fifty francs. When he had got his breath 
he explained that he had sold his first 
~picture. Thereafter, his pictures sold— 
sold for all they were worth—until he 


France was ‘‘so impressed by the quiet 
manliness of the young artist’”’ that he was 
invited to her estate at Neuilly to copy 
certain portraits, and incidentally to give 
lessons in drawing to the Princess Marie. 
Of this event we read that “‘the gentle, 
mild-voiced artist knew his place and did 
not presume on terms of equality with 
the Princess who traced a direct pedigree 


quit painting, in 1858. 


enjoyed the favor of 
the greater part of the 
aristocracy of France 
in particular and of 
Europe in general. In 


the beginning the 
prices he got for his 
~ pictures were not 


large, ‘but there was 
always enough money 
so that the gaunt 
wolf that once 
scratched and sniffed 
at the Scheffer studio 
door was no longer to 
be seen or heard. 


Five years later we 


find General Lafa- 


In the interim he 


IS “Christ Tempted of Satan’’ shows 

the Franco-Dutch painter, Ary Schef- 
fer, at the maturity of his genius. It, of 
course, illustrates the scriptural statement 
that “‘Again, the devil taketh Him up 
into an exceeding high mountain, and 
sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the 
world, and the glory of them; and saith 
unto Him, All these things will I give thee, 
if thou fall down and worship me.” The 
artist has chosen to paint the tempter and 
tempted at the dramatic moment when 
Jesus is preparing to deliver His answer. 
The benign expression on the face of 
Christ is one of the triumphs of this canvas, 
considered by many his best painting. 


to Louis the Great. 


He thought to wait 
and allow her gradu- 
ally to show her qual- 
ity. She tried her 
caustic wit upon him, 
and he looked at her 
out of mild blue eyes 
and made no reply to 
her who had played 
tierce and thrust with 
every man she had 
met, and had come 
off without a scar. 
But here was a man 
of pride and poise, far 
beneath her in a so- 
cial way, yet who had 
rebuked her haughty 
spirit by a simple 
look.’ Surreptitious- 


yette' writing to a 
friend in reference to 
a proposed visit to his Chateau de la 
Grange: “I do not think you will find it 
dull here. Among others of our household 
is a talented young painter by the name 
of Scheffer.’”? - Incidentally, the young 
painter was making a portrait of Lafayette 
that is regarded as one of the best of him 
in existence. Through his strong Republi- 
can tendencies Scheffer had very naturally 
drifted into the company of those who 
knew Lafayette. The artist knew the his- 
tory of the great man and was familiar 
with his American career. Scheffer, as 
Elbert Hubbard records, in his ‘“‘Eminent 
Painters,’’ was interested in America, ‘“‘for 
the radicals with whom he associated were 
well aware that there might come a time 
when they would have to seek hastily some 
hospitable clime where to think was not a 
crime.’’ Lafayette was sixty-one; Scheffer 
was twenty-three at the time, but there at 
once sprang up a warm friendship between 
them that lasted until the death of the 
great French patriot. While sojourning 
with Lafayette, Scheffer met the Duchess 
of Orleans, and that future Queen of 


‘his art life into three periods. 


138 


ly, it is intimated, 
they fell in love and ‘‘there came a decided 
evolution in his art; but it was not until 
she had passed away that one could pick 
out an unsigned canvas and say positively, 
‘This is Scheffer’s.’ In all his work one 
sees that look of soul, and in his best 
one beholds a use of the blue background 
that rivals the blue of heaven. No other 
painter has gotten such effects from colors 
so simple.”’ 
Born at Dordrecht, Holland, in 1795, Ary 
Scheffer studied drawing at Lille, and in 
1811 went to Paris, where, under Guérin, 
he had Géricault and Delacroix for fellow 
students, and with them eventually re- 
volted against the ultra-classicism of 
Guérin. 
The three classes of subjects affected by 
Scheffe: serve in a general way to divide 
The third, 
characterized by religious subjects, dated 
from 1837. After his forty-fifth year he was 
largely occupied with sacred themes, and 
reached his highest achievement in ‘‘Christ 
Tempted of Satan,” “Christ Weeping over 
Jerusalem”’ and the “Christ of the Reed.”’ 





THE TEMPTATION OF CHRIST 








ARY SCHEFFER (1795-1858) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. IV. Louvre, Paris 


VERONESE 


AOLO VERONESE is the 
wonder and despair of mod- 
ern painters by reason of the 
quality, facility and quantity 
of his work, so much of which 

was done so admirably and so easily as to 

seem incredible. Granting that he may 
not be so great an artist as Titian, nor so 
great a poet as Tintoretto, neither of them 
produced anything which as a downright 


\ 





one of the first to recognize the genius of 
Veronese, whose progress he did- much to 
advance. 

One of his early and interesting commis- 
sions was to decorate, in conjunction with 
several of the most celebrated Venetian 
artists, the newly built Library of St. 
Mark’s. A prize of honor, over and above 
the price agreed upon for the work, was 
to be conferred upon that artist whose 


tour de force of 
painting equals his 
‘Marriage at Cana.” 
Working side by side, 
as Veronese did, with 
Titian and Tintoretto, 
the whole splendor of 
Venice is revealed in 
his canvases, and his 
decorations in the 
Ducal Palace immor- 
talize the pageantry 
which characterized 
the Italy of his time. 
Veronese, whose real 
name was Paolo Cag- 
liari, was born in Ve- 
rona, as his cognomen 
implies, in 1528. His 
father was a sculptor, 
and was ambitious for 
his son to follow in 


T the ‘Marriage of Cana,”’ Veronese 

assembles in a vast hall and beneath 
marble porticos numerous illustrious char- 
acters, from Solyman, Sultan of Turkey, 
to the Emperor Charles V, and has at the 
feast many of the famous artists of his 
day, thus “bequeathing to posterity the 
most incongruous and at the same time 
the most truthful and vivid of documents.”’ 
Painted in his thirty-fifth year, he re- 
ceived for.it 324 silver ducats and a pipe 
of wine, besides the cost of materials and 
his own living expenses while engaged 
upon the work. Ruskin describes it as 
“one blaze of worldly pomp.” Many 
critics pronounce it as beyond question 
“the masterpiece of modern painting,”’ and 
as one of the great pictures of the world. 


’ 


work might be ad- 
judged superior. 
“And after all the 
pictures had been 
well examined,” 
writes Vasari, “a 
golden chain was 
placed around the 
neck of Paolo Vero- 
nese, he, by the 
opinion of all, being 
adjudged to have 
done the best.”’ 

His ‘Marriage at 
Cana” was painted 


. for the Convent of 


San Giorgio Maggi- 
ore, and was followed 
by other large can- 
vases representing 
similar Biblical scenes. 
‘All these great com- 


his footsteps. But the boy early gave 
evidence of a marked predilection for 
painting, and in his early twenties executed 
decorations for the Mantuan Cathedral 
that so far surpassed those of his collabo- 
rators that he found himself the object of 
considerable ill-will and jealousy. 

Presently we hear of him in Venice, at 
work on a commission to paint a Corona- 
tion of the Virgin and other subjects for 
the sacristy of the Church of San Sebasti- 
ano. Such was his initial success that he 
was intrusted with the decoration of the 
ceiling of the church with scenes from the 
story of Esther and Ahasuerus. The im- 
pression created by this work was pro- 
found. Still under thirty, the fame of the 
young painter was assured. He found him- 
self the most popular artist of the day in 
Venice, ‘‘acknowledged by one and all to 
be well-nigh the equal of Tintoretto,’’ who 
was ten years his senior, and ‘‘even to 
rival Titian,’’ then in his eightieth year. 
Titian, with characteristic generosity, was 


140 


positions,’’ it has been noted, “‘in spite of 
their sacred titles, were, in reality, merely 
reproductions of those sumptuous ban- 
quets and festive entertainments in which 
the wealthy Venetians took delight, and 
which were marked by an ever-increasing 
degree of state and ceremonial. The pres- 
ence of Christ and His disciples are but 
accessories in the scene. The stately 
Palladian erchitecture and gorgeous cos- 
tumes, the crowd of musicians, the buf- 
foons and lackeys, the gold and silver plate, 
the silken canopies and banners, are all 
borrowed from Venetian life.’ 

Veronese plainly delighted in portraying 
such scenes. He is said to have written on 
the back of one of his drawings: “If I 
ever have time, I want to represent a 
sumptuous banquet in a superb hall, at 
which will be present the Virgin, the 
Saviour, and St. Joseph. They will be 
served by the most brilliant retinue of angels 
which one can imagine . . . to show with 
what zeal blessed spirits serve the Lord.” 


THE MARRIAGE AT CANA 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 


PAOLO VERONESE (1528-1588) 


John II, 1 





Louvre, Paris 


GHIRLANDAJO 


HIRLANDAJO painted while 
his beloved Florence, under 
the fitful rule of Piero de 
Medici, was moving swiftly to 
its doom. The doomsman, in 
this case, was one Fra Girolamo Savona- 
rola, whose sermons against the current 
vanities of the rich and luxurious city 
filled the fashionable throngs at the 
Church of San Marco with apprehension. 


“Ghirlandajo,’”’ applauds Vasari, ‘“‘who val- 
ued glory and honor much more than riches, 
immediately remitted all the remainder, 
declaring that he had it much more at 
heart to give his patron satisfaction than 
to secure the additional payment for 
himself.”’ 

Though Ghirlandajo is charged by John 
Addington Symonds with lacking ‘‘almost 
every other true poetic quality, he com- 


Eight years before his 
death, this Florentine 
master was commis- 
sioned by Piero de 
Medici’s privy treas- 
urer, Giovanni Tor- 
nabuoni, to decorate 
the walls of the choir 
of Santa Maria No- 
vella, which was un- 
der the patronage of 
the impoverished Ric- 
ci family. Their per- 
mission was obtained 
on condition of set- 
ting the Ricci arms 
“in the most con- 
spicuous and honor- 
able place in that 
Chapel.”’ Ghirlan- 
dajo, writes Vasari, 
“‘actually set the Tor- 
nabuoni arms in huge 
scale on the side pilas- 
ters, whereas’ he 
painted -the Ricci 


CALLED to Rome in 1481 to help deco- 


rate the Sistine Chapel, Ghirlandajo’s’ 


two principal works were the ‘‘Resurrec- 
tion’ and the “Calling of Peter and An- 
drew.’’ Critics and connoisseurs united 
in praising this latter fresco as one of the 
very best in the entire series. The scene 
is on the shores of Lake Gennesaret at the 
beginning of Christ’s ministry. The cen- 
tral figure is Jesus himself, with hand 
uplifted blessing Peter and Andrew whom 
he has just called as followers. The newly 
made disciples kneel before the Master, 
their attitudes and expressions full of deep 
reverence and humility. On both sides 
are introduced spectators, in the dress of 
the day, recognized as members of the 
Florentine colony then living in Rome. 
The man in the cloak is the Archbishop 
Rainoldo Orsini, the Greek Argyropolos 
is nearer the front, as also is Giovanni 
Tornabuoni, the Medici privy treasurer. 


bined the art of dis- 
tributing figures in a 
given space with per- 
spective, fair knowl- 
edge of the nude, and 
truth to nature, in 
greater perfection 
than any other single 
painter of the age.’’ 
He painted only fres- 
cos and tempera pic- 


tures, and never 
worked in oils. 
The Messrs. Blash- 


field and A. A. Hop- 
kins acclaim Ghirlan- 
dajo ‘‘a true painter, 
who shows his subtle- 
ty in characteriza- 
tion, in differentia- 
tion of feature, in 
seizing the personal- 
ity of each model, in 
sympathetic compre- 
hension of widely dif- 
ferent types of men. 


arms half a foot high on the door of the 
ciborium in the base of his altar-piece.”’ 
Incidentally, the painter was to receive 
for his work 1100 gold ducats. If, how- 
ever, the frescos greatly pleased him, Tor- 
nabuoni was to pay 200 ducats more. 
Nearly four years were required to execute 
the commission, and for one of those 
years ‘“‘a touchy and ugly little boy who 
carried the disproportionately great name 
of Michel Angelo Buonarotti scrambled dis- 
contentedly about the scaffolding of the 
choir, lending a hand here and there, and 
learning the old art of fresco painting. 
His teacher, of course, never knew that 
in the restless apprentice was a Titan in 
embryo.’ The work done, Tornabuoni is 
said to have acknowledged it to be well 
worth the extra 200 ducats, but he begged 
the painter not to press him for that sum. 


142 


... His grave and virile style is the link 
between Masaccio in the beginning and 
Raphael at the culmination of the art of 
painting. To the student of the Renais- 
sance, of Florentine history, or of the 
‘human document,’ his portraits of the 
contemporaries of the Magnificent Lo- 
renzo and of Savonarola are invaluable; 
the old town still lives in these frescos, 
and though the master was not given the 
‘walls of Florence to paint,’ as he desired, 
he portrayed the world within those walls.”’ 
At the age of forty-five, in the year 1494 
Ghirlandajo was stricken with what prob- 
ably was the plague. Hearing of his illness, 
Tornabuoni regretted his parsimony, and 
sent him100 ducats, buttoo late. On Janu- 
ary 11 Ghirlandajo died, and was buried in 
the Florentine church where his own works 
make his most beautiful monument. 


THE CALLING 


GHIRLANDAJO (1449-1494) 
Matt. IV, 18 





OF PETER AND ANDREW 


Noa an ieocage Awan’ 


ae 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Sistine Chapel, Rome 


PAOLO MICHETTI 


DOARDO DALBONO, the 
well-known Neapolitan paint- 
q er, in reviewing his art-student 
days, recalls a winter evening 
of 1868 in the life-class of the 
Art Academy at Naples. It being a chilly 
day, and the studio not being heated, he 
was walking to and fro in the rear of the, 
room, to restore his circulation between 
poses of the model, when he detected in 
hiding behind the 
benches a peasant lad 
clutching some ragged 
sheets of paper and 
the stub of a pencil. 
He had crawled into 
the darkest corner of 
the studio. 

‘“‘What are you doing 
there in the dark, in- 
stead of sitting out 
“on the benches to 
draw?’ asked Dal- 
bono, curiously. 
“But who will give 
me a drawing-board 
and a good piece of 
drawing paper? Be- 
sides, they won’t let 
me sit out there. 
When the attendant 
sees me, he puts me 
out the door,” an- 
swered the boy, in 
Abruzzi. 

“Let me see what you’ve drawn.” 

And the boy held forth a drawing that 
the master of the class, Domenico Mo- 
relli, pronounced superior to the work of 
any of the regularly accredited students, 
regardless of age or advantages. The next 
day the “‘studio stowaway,’’ whose name 
was Francesco Paolo Michetti, became a 
fellow student with and a special charge 
of Dalbono in the Art Academy of Naples, 
and in the course of a few years he was to 
rank as one of the modern masters of 
Italian art. 

Eulogized by the usually conservative 
critic, Richard Muther, of the University 
of Breslau, as ‘“‘a painter of bold and 
magnificent talent,’’ a genuine product of 
the wild Abruzzi, Paolo Michetti was the 
son of a day-laborer, as was his master, 
Morelli. He was born at Tocco da Casau- 
ria, near Chieti, in 1851, and his early 





this subject. 


coins! 


the dialect of the 


MM ICHETTI paints the “Cleansing of the 

Temple’ with an animation and gro- 
tesque naturalism that is characteristic of 
his art and is peculiarly appropriate to 
Christ, records St. John, 
having ‘‘made a scourge of small cords, 
drove them all out of the temple, and the 
sheep and the oxen; and poured out the 
changers’ money... .” How effectively is 
the scene of confusion and covetousness 
portrayed, with the merchants crawling on 
the steps and clutching for the scattered 
Tugging at leashes are the white 
and black sheep, typifying the sacrilegious 
trade in animals; and standing near the 
left pillar on the upper steps of the temple 
is the quiet Christ, His wrath cooling, and 
with the cords tangled in His hands. 


‘people. 


144 


years were those of toil and privation. 
He seems to have had little or no instruc- 
tion in drawing, and to have received no 
encouragement to master the art of paint- 
ing. In fact, he was left an orphan at an 
early age; and it was his savings from the 
scant wages he received as a farm laborer 
that enabled him to go to Naples, and 
incidentally to become a pupil of Morelli. 
So rapidly did Michetti develop that he 
returned to his na- 
tive place before a 
great while with such 
evidences of his abil- 
ity as an artist that 
he not only found 
patrons, but was 
granted a subsidy by 
the Province of Chi- 
eti with which to re- 
sume his studies in 
Naples. 

Fortune smiled on the 
peasant painter and 
he was enabled to 
travel extensively, to 
Rome, Paris and Lon- 
don in turn, but as 
early as 1876 he was 
back in Naples, still 
seeing and painting 
genre pictures of 
peasant life in south- 
ern Italy, distinguished for their richness 
of color and dramatic insight. Tiring of 
Naples in a short time, this leader of the 
new school of Italian painters settled amid 
the Abruzzi, close to the Adriatic, in 
Francavilla 4 Mare, near Ostona. There, 
in 1877, Michetti painted the work which 
laid the foundation of his celebrity, ‘‘The 
Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti,’ a 
picture that ‘‘rose like a skyrocket in its 
boisterous, exhilarating medley of bright 
colors.”’ 

In all his pictures Michetti shows himself 
an improviser of dexterity, overcoming 
awesome difficulties with apparent ease, 
shedding a blaze of color over everything— 
a man to whom painting was as much a 
matter of course as spelling is to most 
The Paris World Exposition of 
1878 left him a celebrated artist, and from 
that time his name has been to the Italian 
connoisseur a symbol for something new, 
unexpected, extravagant, wild. 


THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE 





op eid PAULO MICHETTI (1852- ) Courtesy Current Literature Pub. 
ohn II, 


Co. 


FRITZ VON UHDE 


REDECESSORS of Fritz von 
Uhde, in the first part of the 
nineteenth century, felt they 
were on the right way in 
representing Christ in art as 

a specially wise and benevolent Jew. As 

a result, their pictures were either comic 

or conveyed an irreverent satiric sugges- 


+ 






upon him which have assisted in making 
his works more familiar. 

‘‘The Sermon on the Mount” was Uhde’s 
first Biblical picture with a scene in the 
open air. In these and other pictures 
Uhde shows himself an eminent painter as 
well as a first-rate psychologist. Every 
one of these pictures is rich in delicate 


tion. Then came Uhde and set modern spiritual observation. In fact, says 
Christians in the place of modern Jews, Muther, “‘A trace of tenderness, inward 
thereby introducing a depthandcordialidyl- 
new phase of religious N Fritz von Uhde’s “Sermon on the licism runs through 


/ 


painting. An age 
wanting in independ- 
ence, such as_ the 


Mount,” painted in 1886, the sun has 
almost set, and its last rays cast a glow 


all the art of Uhde. 
His Christ — that 
quiet Being laying 


early part of the last 
century, was enslaved 
by classical forms and, 
as Muther observes, 
“confined itself to a 
lukewarm repetition 
of figures borrowed 
from the fifteenth 
century, which be- 
came so diluted that 
they gradually as- 
sumed a Byzantine 
pattern.” 

When Uhde exhibited 
his first revolution- 
ary picture in 1884 
he had seen life from 
many angles. His 
father was an ecclesi- 


upon the field. A peaceful village, its red 
roofs dimly described, is in the back- 
ground. Tired and travel-stained, Christ 
has seated Himself upon a bench in an 
open field, and is preaching to the “‘poor 
in spirit’? who have gathered ’round Him. 
Some are kneeling at His feet. Troops of 
men and women in various stages of emo- 
tion are descending from the hillside to 
hear the preacher. The various gestures 
of naive humility, pious devotion, edifica- 
tion and sincere uplifting of the heart are 
masterly in expression. Anameless yearn- 
ing, an ardent desire to understand the 
spoken words, is expressed in the dilated 
blue eyes of the two women near the 
preacher, as in the faces of the men. 


His hand so softly 
down and moving 
with such _ spiritual 
calm—is the imper- 
sonation of benevo- 
lence, the embodi- 
ment of brotherly 
love.” 

At the same time, 
“In spite of all their 
wealth of spiritual 
feeling Uhde’s pic- 
tures produce an ef- 
fect upon the major- 
ity of the _ public 
that is much more 
strange than convinc- 
ing. The naiveté and 
naturalness quite un- 


astical functionary, 

and the subject of this sketch was born 
in Saxony in 1848. His career as an artist, 
for which he studied in Dresden, was in- 
terrupted by ten years of military serv- 
ice, two years of which were in the Franco- 
Prussian War. 

Upon retiring from the army in 1877, 
with the rank of captain, he again devoted 
himself to art, going to Paris, where, for a 
time, he was strongly influenced by 
Munk4acsy. Two canvases exhibited in 
1880 in the Paris Salon were the fruits 
of his residence in that city. 

It was only after his return to his home 
in Munich, when he was induced to visit 
Holland, that his views underwent a revo- 
lution. His expression became richer and 
his brush more powerful, especially as a 
Biblical painter. In that field he has 
scored his most decided successes, associ- 
ated as they are with those violent attacks 


146 


consciously produced 
by the old masters, according to the gen- 
eral supposition, is in Uhde a logical con- 
clusion, the result of an involved system 
of ideas. In clothing Biblical personages 
in the dress of modern peasants, the effect 
is complicated. 
Nevertheless, in sheer ability and senti- 
ment the art of Fritz von Uhde holds a 
place of its own in modern German art. 
It is explained that Uhde merely chose 
modern costume to avoid the medley and 
confusion of historical costume, and divert 
no one from the physical character of the 
motive by an external, antiquarian equip- 
ment. To justify his conception, may be 
cited as his accomplices all the old mas- 
ters of Teutonic origin, and even the 
Italians of periods other than that of 
Raphael. It remains to be seen whether 
later generations will view his pictures 
as we now see the work of the old masters, 





FRITZ VON UHDE (1848-1911) 
Matt. V, VI, VII 


BENJAMIN-CONSTANT 


EAN JOSEPH BENJAMIN- 
CONSTANT once described 
himself as having been ‘‘a Pari- 
sian, born in the flesh in 1845, 
and born as an artist in 1872, 

on first visiting Morocco. . . . Since then 

I have had no other dream than to be a 

painter of Oriental scenes, to lead the life 

prefaced in painting by Marilhat, Delacroix 
and Henri Regnault.”’ 





studio. Ah,’ he continued, ‘“‘you are 
lucky in England to be free from that 
affectation of diseased refinement that 
turns to flabby morbidness, and calls itself 
‘new art.’ You Anglo-Saxon-Celts are 
strong, you go straight to the point, you 
reach your goal sooner or later. You have 
patience to wait, you are not disheartened 
by failure or spoiled by success; and those 
are qualities in art, as in life, that over- 


This was after the 
Franco-Prussian War, 
in which Constant 
rendered military 
service; and his road 
to the Orient led 
through Christian and 
Moorish Spain, the 
occasion being an em- 
bassage to the Sultan 
of Morocco. He had 
been a pupil of Caba- 
nel, but after his so- 
journ in Africa he no 
longer was under the 
influence of that mas- 
ter, falling, as he did, 
under ‘“‘the enchant- 
ing spell of tropical 
sunshine.’” That and 
tropical heat are im- 


THE scene of the picture of ‘Jesus in 

the Great Storm’’ is the Sea of Galilee 
and the occasion is shortly after the calling 
of the disciples, when He and certain of 
them took ship to “pass over unto the 
other side.’ St. Mark relates: “And 
there arose a great storm of wind, and the 
waves beat into the ship. And He was in 
the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a 
pillow.” Two of the Apostles are shown 
here arousing the sleeping Saviour, who, 
being awakened, “rebuked the wind, and 
said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the 
wind ceased, and there was a great calm.” 
The violence of the storm is indicated by 
the absence of oars from the boat which, 
nevertheless, is scudding the waves, in 
partial control of the helmsman. 


shadow all the 
brilliance of easy suc- 
cess. . ... Better not 
to have attained per- 
fection of accomplish- 
ment than, doing so, 
to take glory in sink- 
ing back exhausted, 
and affect pride in 
proclaiming the poetic 
beauty of mental 
atrophy.” 

It was firmness, ener- 
gy, solidity that he 
loved, and any at- 
tempt at mountebank- 
ism in art Constant 
detested-—that is to 
say, in shirking the 
difficulties of painting. 
Critics are not lacking 


pressive elements of 

his representations, and, as Dr. Muther 
notes, “‘there is a seeming affiliation be- 
tween the joyous light and color he loves to 
paint, and his own geniality, which, united 
with his artistic endowment, places him 
among the Salon Forty, though one of the 
youngest.” Indeed, a friend of many 
years standing speaks of “revelling in that 
merry, rather solid Constant humor which 
matched so well his powerful physique and 
his leonine head. His face was rather that 
of a comedian—a tragi-comedian—and it 
was a true index to his manner with his 
friends, in a measure, too, of his art.”’ 

Not that Benjamin-Constant was other 
than tremendously in earnest, and took 
his art in all seriousness. To him any evi- 
dence of affectation was repugnant, and it 
was something that he would never tolerate 
in his pupils. A contemporary English 
painter was once commenting on the spirit 
of decadency abroad in the French art 
world of the period. ‘‘ Décadents!’’ echoed 
Constant, “‘I will have no décadents in my 


148 


who find fault with 
Constant for striving for an impressiveness 
that results in showiness; but none asserts 
that his work was dishonest. Of so-called 
impressionistic painting, he once observed: 
“The Academy does well to shut it out, as 
port officers shut out the plague. . . . The 
modern decadent is artistically tubercular, 
and the impressionist who thinks that his 
scientific experiments with light and with 
optic nerves are art is suffering from a 
lupus; and they are both ugly diseases.” 
His Oriental canvases reveal Constant to 
be a fine colorist and a master of technique. 
After 1880, however, he abruptly changed 
his manner, devoting himself to mural 
decorations and to portraits, until his 
death in 1902. The most prominent exam- 
ples of the former are a great plafond in the 
Hotel-de-Ville, Paris, and a series of frescos 
in the new Sorbonne. He painted impor- 
tant mural decorations in other cities of 
France, and was equally distinguished as a 
portrait painter. Constant visited the 
United States several times. 


EAN JOSEPH BENJAMIN-CONSTANT (1845-1902) 
att. VIII, 24, Luke VIII, 23 


CHRIST ON THE WATERS 





Courtesy Current Literature Pub. Co. 


LHERMITTE 


EON AUGUSTIN’ LHER- 
MITTE, who ranks with Bas- 
tien-Lepage and Millet as a 
French painter of peasants, 
was himself the son of a 

peasant. His birthplace was Mont-Saint- 
Pére, near Chateau-Thierry, a quiet old 
town where, before the Great War, there 
infirmly stood a Gothic church surrounded 
by the moss-grown roofs of thatched houses. 
There he was born in 
1844. In the great 
drive of the Germans 
toward Paris in 1914 
the place was virtu- 
ally wiped out, but 
has been restored. 
Lhermitte’s grand- 
sire was a vine-grower 
and his father a 
village schoolmaster. 
He worked in the field 
himself, and, like Mil- 
let, he painted after- 
wards the _ things 
which he had done 
himself in youth. His 
principal works are 
pictures of reapers in 
the field, peasant 
women in church, 
young wives nursing 
their children, rustics 
at work, here and 
there masterly water-colors, pastels and 
charcoal drawings. There is his decora- 
tion of a hall at the Sorbonne with repre- 
sentations of rustic life, in his later period 
occasionally pictures from other circles of 
life, such as ‘“‘The Fish Market of St. 
Malo,” ‘‘The Lecture in the Sorbonne,” 
‘‘The Musical Soirée,’’ and finally, as a 
result of the religious tendency of French 
art in his later years, “Among the Lowly.”’ 
Although Lhermitte has maintained a 
studio in Paris during the greater part of 
his productive life, he has spent most of 
his time and done most of his work in his 
native village, living quietly and simply 
with the peasants. The majority of his 
pictures, which are ranked among the 
most robust productionsof modern Natural- 
ism, were painted in a great glass studio 
which Lhermitte built in the garden of his 
ancestral home. 

Contrasting Lhermitte 





lowly inmates. 


ing near her. 


woman’s knee. 


and _.« Bastien- 


N “Among the Lowly,’’ the French 

peasant painter, Lhermitte, conceives 
of the Master visiting a typical peasant 
cottage and manifesting Himself to the 
He is standing back of a 
table, His hand raised in benediction. 
At the left the mother sits with an infant 
in her arms and three children are stand- 
Beyond, in an open door- 
way, stands a man with a boy in his arms; 
at the right an old couple is seated, a 
young girl stands behind them, and in the 
foreground a child leans against the old 
The reverence of these 
simple people for the Master is indicated 
by the fact that the man in the doorway 
has removed his hat and is listening with 
his head bowed. Christ would seem to 
be saying grace over the humble meal on 
the table before the mother and child. 


150 


Lepage, the critic Muther observes that 
while the latter, “through a certain soft- 
ness of temperament, was moved to paint 
the weak rather than the strong, and less 
often men in the prime of life than patri- 
archs, women and children, Lhermitte 
displays the peasant in all his rusticity. 
He knows the country and the labors of 
the field which make the hands horny and 
the face brown, and he has rendered them 
in a strictly objective 
manner, in a great 
sculptural style. Bas- 
tien-Lepage is in- 
clined to refinement 
and poetic tender- 
ness; in Lhermitte 
everything is clear, 
precise, and sober as 
pale, bright daylight.” 
As with his great 
senior, Millet, Lher- 
mitte has not come 
under the influence 
of any tradition, but 
he has approached 
art like the man in 
the age of stone who 
first scratched the 
outline of a mam- 
moth on a piece of 
ivory, or like the 
primeval Greek who, 
according to legend, 
invented painting by making a likeness of 
his beloved with a charred stick upon a 
wall. Unlike Millet, however, who re- 
ceived no encouragement in his first artistic 
attempts, Lhermitte was regarded as a 
prodigy by his parents, and the same 
opinion seems to have been held by their 
friends and neighbors. Growing up in 
close sympathy with the simple life of an 
Aisne village, it naturally furnished him 
with picture subjects and his inborn talent 
found early development through the 
generosity of a neighbor who sent him to 
Paris to study in 1863. His first master 
was Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who is reputed 
to have been a much greater teacher than 
painter. His first successes were in char- 
coal, and his skill as an aquarellist and 
etcher is regarded by many as equalling his 
incontestable talent as a painter. His pic- 
tures are in the Metropolitan Museum of 
New York and many foreign galleries. 


AMONG THE LOWLY 





LEON AUGUSTIN LHERMITTE (1844-1925) Metropolitan Museum. 
New York City 


. 


WILL H. LOW 


ROBABLY this American art- 
ist is better known as an illus- 
trator than as a figure and 
genre painter. That he has 
succeeded in all three depart- 

ments is evidence of his versatility and 

artistic capability. Will H. Low was not 
intended by his parents to be an artist and, 
indeed, he received very little encourage- 
ment to develop himself in that direction. 
Although he made 
/ 


+ 






sketches in his boy- 
hood, his first real 
impetus to become 
‘an artist was fur- 
nished by an English 
painter who was em- 
ployed in this coun- 
try in decorating 
Pullman cars with 
still-life pictures of 
flowers and sundry 
ornaments such as 
were parlor-and- 
sleeping-car features 


N this picture of “Christ and the Woman 
Taken in Adultery,” the artist paints the 
-woman kneeling at the feet of the Saviour, 
who has just uttered the words, “‘Neither 
do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” 
This was after the scribes and Pharisees 
had brought the accused woman to Him, 
asking whether she should not be stoned 
according to the Mosaic law, and had left 
the two alone, on hearing Christ say, 
“He that is without sin among you, let 
him cast the first stone at her.” 


city of his artistic dreams the young 
American aspirant was caught in a crowd 
of Parisians who, unknown to him, were 
making their way to the opening of the 
Salon. It was in the morning, but despite 
the fact that he had not breakfasted, he 
remained all day in that “holy of holies” 
without a thought of other food than was 
his to gaze upon in the form of pictures. 
A sketch made by Low at Barbizon, where 
he was influenced by 
association with Mil- 
let and other painters 
of that school, gained 
the favorable notice 
of Munkdacsy, who 
advised him to avoid 
all schooling and de- 
pend on his natural 
talent. Millet, how- 
ever, advised him to 
the. contrary, and he 
returned to Paris to 
study under Carolus 


The Duran. It was while 


in the ’sixties and expression of the hands, bothof the woman he was with Carolus 

seventies. and of the Saviour, is peculiarly eloguent Duran that another 

ria ay Rohe a i in this picture, which ranks high as a re- Andean ante wae 
any, ew Orka wae ets aS A 

Low’s early education ligious painting of ‘charm and. orgimaiity received into’ the 


was interrupted by 
ill health and he left 
school before he was fifteen years old. 
Despite parental opposition, he persisted in 
his determination to become an. artist, 
and by 1870 had made such progress, 
without the aid of any master, that he 
went to New York and for two years 
supported himself as a magazine illus- 
trator and in making theatrical posters. 
One of his first magazine commissions 
came from Harper’s Weekly, as a contrib- 
utor to which he met and formed a lifelong 
friendship with Edwin A. Abbey. 

During his early days in New York Low 
submitted a drawing to the National 
Academy of Design, which was rejected 
because it was done in pencil. Subse- 
quently he was an instructor in that 
institution for a period of three years, 
and for more than six years he was chair- 
man of its school committee. In 1872 he 
had a painting hung in the Academy 
Exhibition. The next year, 1873, he went 
to Paris to study with Géréme at the 
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. On arriving in the 


by a distinctly modern American artist. 


152 


studio, in the seven- 
teen-year-old person 
of the late lamented John Singer Sargent. 
Low recounts an amusing incident of his 
student days in Paris, which reveals 
Carolus Duran and his atelier in an inter- 
esting light. The class was modeling in 
clay one morning, when one of its mem- 
bers went into an ante-room. Anticipat- 
ing his return, a practical joker secured a 
wet sponge and, mounting a stool, an- 
nounced his intention to “Let ‘Becky’ 
have it’? when he entered. The door 
opened and he flung the sponge. It 
struck, not the intended victim, but the 
master, ‘‘brave in his blue velvet coat 
and yellow silk shirt.”” There was a mo- 
ment of suspense. Then the master with- 
drew, closing the door after him. It 
presently reopened, and Carolus Duran, 
his disorder repaired, reappeared and was 
greeted with a stammering apology and 
explanation. His magnanimity in excusing 
the mistake and proceeding quietly with 
the lesson, inspired the wholesome respect 
of the class. 


“HE THAT IS WITHOUT SIN AMONG YOU, 
LET HIM FIRST CAST A STONE AT HER” 


rs 





WILL H. LOW (1853- ) Courtesy of the Artist 
John VIII, 7 


PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 


AIERRE CECILE PUVIS DE 
CHAVANNES, scion of an 
old Burgundian family which 
took pride in tracing its gene- 
alogy back to the year 1152, 
was born at Lyons, France, where his 
father was a mining engineer, in 1824. 
He was intended to be an engineer, but 
while on a pleasure trip to Italy in his 
nineteenth year the sight of the Italian 
works of art opened 
/ 





a new horizon to his 
imagination. He de- 
cided to be an artist, 
and studied under 
several masters, one 
of whom was Dela- 
croix, and none of 
whom seems to have 
been satisfactory to 
him. He quitted the 
studio of Couture, for 
instance, because the 
master found fault 
with his way of ren- 
dering flesh tones and 
insisted upon Puvis 
following his own ste- 
reotyped formula. The instructor went 
too far, it seems, when he proceeded to 
alter the entire color-scheme of the study 
on which the pupil was engaged. ‘‘What, 
Monsieur,” cried Puvis, in amazement, 
“is that the way you really see the model?”’ 
And after that day he never returned to 
the atelier. 

After leaving Couture he abandoned all 
idea of learning to paint in the usual 
fashion, and organized a group of ‘friends 
who, like himself, wanted to paint from 
the living model, into a sort of communal 
academy that existed for a number of 
years. During nine of those years his pic- 
tures submitted to the Paris Salon were 
invariably refused, and things would have 
gone hard with the artist had he not en- 
joyed an independent income. Unde- 
terred by rebuffs and believing strongly in 
himself, Puvis sent the rejected canvases 
to private exhibitions in Paris where they 
occasioned much public merriment. 

It was not until 1859, when he was thirty- 
five years old, that he conquered the Salon 
with his ‘“‘Return from Hunting,”’ and re- 
peated the performance two years later 
with two mural pictures, ‘‘Peace’’ and 


on a platter. 


N the accompanying picture Puvis de 


ment of Herod, who had appropriated his 
brother’s wife and thereby inspired her 
enmity. She was the mother of Salome, 
whose dancing so delighted Herod that he 
offered to grant any boon she might crave. 
Sharing the hatred of her mother for 
John the Baptist, she asked for his head 
She is shown here witness- 
ing the act of the executioner in carrying 
out the decree inspired by her request. 


154 


“War.’’ For the first time his work was 
seriously discussed by the critics; he was 
awarded a medal of the second class, and 
the government purchased one of his pic- 
tures. 

Subsequently the city of Amiens secured 
these two pictures for its new Musée de 
Picardie, and, needing two more mural 
paintings to adorn the main staircase of 
the museum, sent the architect to inter- 
view the painter. 
“‘Have you, by good 


Chavannes, who diverted French art ee tiene ce 
into a new course, paints John in the act that will SAT) ste 
of paying the price for his public arraign- purpose?” For an- 


swer the artist 
brought out two im- 
mense rolls of canvas. 
“Have I what you 
want!”’ he exclaimed. 
“Here they are— 
‘Work’ and ‘Rest’. 
They are of the same 
dimensions as ‘War’ 
and ‘Peace’, and were 
executed to accompa- 
ny them.” As the 
city of Amiens was not able to pay for 
these works at once, the painter gave them 
to the museum, and their reception was 
such that the civic authorities ordered a 
new composition for the same building. 
This painting, exhibited under the title of 
‘‘Ave Picardia Nutrix’’ at the 1865 Salon, 
created a sensation, and thenceforward the 
position of Puvis de Chavannes as a mural 
decorator was assured. 

In 1890 the trustees of the Boston Public 
Library invited de Chavannes to decorate 
the staircase of that building, and offered 
him 200,000 francs (the largest sum he had 
ever received) for the work, which was to 
comprise one large painting and eight 
smaller panels. After much hesitation, due 
to advancing age and the poor health of 
his wife, he finally accepted the commission 
and in 1895, at the age of seventy-one, 
began work on the pictures, which were 
finished in 1897. 

Before he had finished his decorations for 
the French Pantheon he fell ill, but with 
characteristic determination continued 
painting until he could no longer hold a 
brush. His death, in 1898, followed not 
long after that of his wife. é 





THE BEHEADING OF JOHN THE BAPTIST 








ws 
5 








PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES (1824-1898) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. XIV Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 
(Loan from John Quinn Collection) 


GUSTAVE MOREAU 


N pictorial art Gustave Moreau 
is equivalent to Charles Beaude- 
laire, whose strange and fasci- 
nating poems strike much the 
same note as the _ tortured, 

subtilised, morbid but mysterious and 
captivating creations of Moreau. Every 
one of his works stands in need of a 
commentary, and bears witness to a pro- 
found and peculiar activity of mind. He 
“gives ear to dying 
strains, rising faintly, 
inaudible to the ma- 


Ts much admired picture, known as 


Before the discovery of the famous Cyprus 
statues no artist would have ventured to 
adorn a Grecian goddess with flowers, 
hairpins and a heavy tiara. Attracted to 
these discoveries, Moreau has been gov- 
erned by strangely exotic inspirations. He 
is said to have worked in his studio ‘“‘as 
in a tower opulent with ivory and jewels.” 
He delights in arraying his figures in the 
most costly materials, as the Cyprus dis- 
coveries give him 
warrant for doing, in 


jority of.men. Mar- 
vellous beings pass 
before him, fantastic 
and yet earnest. ... 
An age which went 
wild over Cabanel 
and Bouguereau 
could not possibly be 
in sympathy with him 
...and it is only since 
the mysterious smile 
of Leonardo’s women 
has once more drawn 
the world beneath its 
spell that the spirit 
of Moreau in art has 


“The Apparition” or “The Vision of 
Salome,” is one of a series dealing with 
Salome which Moreau painted in 1878. 
In a sombre hall supported by mighty 
pillars, sits Herod, half asleep with hash- 
eesh and motionless as a Hindoo idol. 
Two women lean at the foot of a pillar. 
One plays a lute. (Flowers strew the 
floor. Salome advances and begins to 
dance. She is loaded with jewels. Sud- 
denly she pauses and presses one hand 
to her bosom: she has seen the head of 
John the Baptist in a blinding halo, and his 
executioner as he stands leaning on the 
sword with which he smote the head 


painting their robes 
in the deepest and 
most barbaric hues, 
and in being almost 
too lavish in his man- 
ner of adorning their 
arms and_ breasts. 
“Every figure of his 
is a glittering idol.... 
The capricious gener- 
ation of the Renais- 
sance occasionally 
treated classical sub- 
jects in this manner, 
but there is the same 
difference between 
Filippino Lippi and 


ae dr weh ie: from the body. Her conscience at having SSS eee 
Born in Paris in 1825, instigated his death is rending her, as her ticelji_ and Burne- 
this strange artist face and attitude eloquently reveal. Jones: the former, 


early fell under the 

influence of Delacroix and his own friend, 
Chassériau. Pursuing his studies in Rome, 
he imitated such painters as Montegna 
and Signorelli. He exhibited little, and 
did not become known until toward the 
end of his life. The only modern painters 
with whom he can be compared are 
Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes. 

In most of his work a complete absence of 
motion has, says Richard Muther, ‘‘taken 
the place of the striding legs, the attitudes 
of the fencing-master, the arms ever- 
lastingly raised to heaven, and the passion- 
ately distorted faces which had reigned in 
French painting since David. He makes 
spiritual expression his starting point, and 
not scenic effect. Everything bears the 
seal of supernatural peace; everything is 
inspired by inward life and suppressed 
passion. Even when the gods fight there 
are no mighty gestures; with e,mere frown 
they can shake the earth like Zeus.”’ 


156 


- like Shakespeare in 
the Midsummer Night’s Dream, trans- 
formed the antique into a blithe and fan- 
tastic world, whereas the fire of yearning 
romance burns in the pictures of Moreau.’’ 
His “Orpheus” is one of his most character- 
istic and strangely attractive creations, 
just as those dealing with Salome, in their 
bizarre sentiment—suggestive of an opium 
dream—are perhaps his most imaginative. 
When Moreau died in 1898, he left his 
eight thousand pictures in water-color and 
in oil to his native city of Paris to form 
the Musée Moreau in the Rue de la 
Rochefoucauld. The most notable of his 
paintings are ‘Jason,’ “Death of the 
Young Man,’ ‘‘Prometheus,” ‘‘Hesiod 
and the Muses,” ‘‘The Sphinx,”’ and ‘‘The 
Vision of Salome,” in the Luxembourg. 
From 1892 to 1898 he was professor in the 
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. At the age of 
forty-nine he received the Cross of the 
Legion of Honor. 


THE VISION OF SALOME 





GUSTAVE MOREAU (1826-1893) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Luxembourg, Paris 


RAPHAEL 


ORK, unceasing work, filled 

the days of Raphael in 

Rome. The ingenuity and 

industry of the man were 

“ marvellous. Supplementing 
his monumental labors in the Palace of 
the Vatican and his architectural direction 
of St. Peter’s, in succession to Bramante, 
more than eighty portraits were painted 
by him, besides designs innumerable for 





the work was ultimately brought to a 
conclusion.”’ 

In two sonnets to this woman, who seems 
to have been the love of his life, Raphael 
addresses her as one far above him, vow- 
ing that he will never reveal her name. 
It is true that a marriage with the niece 
of his close friend Cardinal Bibbiena was 
once arranged for, the date of the wedding 
set and the Pope was to perform the cere- 


engravings, and even 
for silver and iron 
ornaments required 
by the Church. 

In addition to his 
work in the papal 
service, Raphael was 
also engaged in exe- 
cuting commissions 
for the wealthy bank- 
er Agostino Chigi, 
not only at his villa 
near Rome—now the 
Villa Farnesina— 
where the fresco of 
“The Triumph | of 
Galatea” still adorns 
_the wall, but in the 
Chigi family chapel in 
the Church of Santa 
Maria del Popolo, 


HIS “Transfiguration’’ is the last pic- 

ture that Raphael painted, and he left 
it to be finished by one of his pupils. 
Somewhat declamatory and violent, what 
it lacks in characterization is made up by 
its wonderful composition, individual move- 
ments and dramatic effect. On the top 
of the mountain, brilliantly lighted in the 
bright cloud, hovers the transfigured 
Saviour between Moses and Elias, above 
three dazzled disciples who have fallen to 
the ground. Meanwhile a scene of hu- 
man misery (based on Matthew XVII, 16) 
is enacted below: the father of the lunatic 
boy, accompanied by a crowd of people, 
has come upon the nine other disciples. 
Of the two women kneeling before the 
apostles, one is the boy’s mother crying 


mony. But Leo X 
regarded Raphael as 
a servant of the 
Church: he had work 
for him to do, and 
moreover, he had 
fixed ideas concern- 
ing the glamour of 
sentimentalism, so he 
requested that the 
wedding be _ post- 
poned from time to 
time—and meanwhile 
the lady died. 

Raphael, in addition 
to decorating the 
Chigi Palace, was 
zealous in the papal 
service of unearthing 
and preserving the 
art treasures which 


where he painted his 
famous Sibyls. His 
last important deco- 
rative work were the 
frescos painted in the 
Chigi, or Farnesina 
Palace, representing 
the mythological story of Cupid and Psyche. 
Vasari relates of this work that the great 
banker, having commissioned Raphael to 
decorate the first floor of his palace, was 
much disturbed because the painter was 
so slow setting to work. Even when he 
started on the frescos, ‘‘Raphael was so 
occupied with the love which he bore to 
the lady of his choice, that he could not 
give sufficient attention to the work. 
Agostino, therefore, falling at length into 
despair of seeing it finished, made so many 
efforts by means of friends and by his 
own care, that after much difficulty he 
prevailed on the lady to take up her abode 
in his house, wHere she was accordingly 
installed in apartments near those which 
Raphael was painting; in which manner 


attitude. 


for help. Supplication is in their every 
And the nine apostles, deeply 
moved and compassionate, realize their 
powerlessness to help, because He who 
might have helped has left them. 


158 


lay buried under the 
ruins of Rome, and 
“with a princely mag- 
nificence sent artists 
through Italy and 
Greece to make draw- 
ings of those antiqui- 
ties which he was unable to see himself. 
He was in intimate correspondence with 
most of the celebrated men of his time; 
interested himself in all that was going 
forward; mingled in society, lived in 
splendor and directed a host of pupils.” 
His most famous easel-picture of ‘‘The 
Sistine Madonna’”’ was painted, entirely by 
his own hand, a year before his death— 
the result of a fever contracted, some say, 
while superintending excavations in the 
malarial quarters of Rome, or, according 
to others, of a chill gotten while awaiting 
an audience with the Pope in one of the 
halls of the Vatican. The dying Raphael 
sent for his old master Perugino, directed 
that he should complete certain unfinished 
work, and expired at thirty-seven. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION 





RAPHAEL (1483-1520) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. XVII Vatican Gallery, Rome 


SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO 


QJEBASTIANO LUCIANI, 

called del Piombo, because 
8 in 1531 Pope Clement VII 
made him keeper of the 
Leaden Seal, painted his most 
celebrated picture, ‘““The Raising of Laza- 
rus,’* as. a result of his association with 
Michel Angelo, who designed to make him 
a rival to Raphael. Sebastiano was a 
Venetian and was “‘discovered’”’ by Agostino 





while their collaboration was mutually 
satisfactory. One supplied what the other 
lacked. 

At the death of Bramante in 1514, however, 
a sudden and important change occurred 
in the so-called school of Rome. Raphael 
was appointed to succeed Bramante as 
the papal architect, and the rivalry between 
him and Michel Angelo became open 
warfare, with the artistic world of Rome 


Chigi, the Croesus of 
his time, who was 
then building on the 
banks of the Tiber the 
famous residence that 
was later to be called 
the Villa Farnesina. 
He occasionally visit- 
ed Venice on business, 
and he grew tolike the 
striking and brilliant 
color work of the 
younger painter, and 
persuaded him to join 
the Roman _§ school. 
This was the period 
of the remarkable ar- 
tistic activity inspired 
by Pope Julius II 


HE Raising of Lazarus,” painted by 

Sebastiano del Piombo in rivalry with 
Raphael, is criticized as lacking devo- 
tional spontaneity. As Canon Farrar 
states, “the painter is thinking exclusively 
of the effectiveness of his picture, not of 
the miracle of Christ’s mercy.” Jesus, 
with one hand uplifted to heaven, and the 
other pointing to Lazarus, has just said, 
“Loose him and let him go.”’ Behind Him 
St. John is arguing with incredulous Phari- 
sees. The face of Lazarus is still over- 
shadowed by the shroud, but his eye is 
fixed on Christ. Behind Him is Martha, 
among other women, half horrified. Three 
men are removing the heavy stone of the 


divided into two 
camps. Raphael had 
an advantage in en- 
joying the favor of 
Pope Julius, who 
found him easy to get 
along with, whereas 
Michel Angelo was 
choleric and disposed 
to be dictatorial. 
Presently the latter 
was sent to Florence 
to build the facade of 
San Lorenzo, a mis- 
sion that amounted to 
exile; and Raphael © 
was left in undisputed 
mastery. 

Before leaving Rome 


who, when not other- 
wise engaged, was 
‘“clambering about 
‘the scaffoldings of the Vatican,” then being 
constructed under the architectural direc- 
tion of Bramante, and decorated by such 
masters as Michel Angelo and Raphael. 
Like a great flame, the Renaissance, at 
the moment when it was on the calendar 
to be dying, was kindled into new and 
greater intensity. The torches of genius, 
however, had been transferred from Flor- 
ence and Umbria to Rome. 

Sebastiano quickly executed an important 
decoration in the Villa Chigi. He was then 
painting with the fluency of a charming 
improvisator, doubtless in imitation of his 
master Giorgione. But events soon made 
him lose his ingenuous_ self-confidence. 
For at this time the great frescos of Michel 
Angelo in the Sistine Chapel and of 
Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura 
were opened to the public and Sebastiano 
must have felt as though he had strayed 
into an overpowering company. Thanks 
to his patron, Chigi, Sebastiano soon be- 
came associated with Raphael, and for a 


sepulchre. 


Mary is at the feet of Jesus. 


160 


Michel Angelo found 
in Sebastiano del 
_ Piombo a lieutenant 
who had quarrelled with Raphael over the 
decorations of the Villa Chigi and was- 
ready to’ espouse his cause. It was a 
strange alliance. According to Vasari, 
Michel Angelo thought that by assisting 
Sebastiano with his drawing, and setting 
him up as a competitor to Raphael, he 
could triumph over his enemies without in 
any way compromising his own reputation. 
Sebastiano tells Michel Angelo, in a letter 
still extant, of his remark to Pope Julius 
that he (Sebastiano) could work miracles 
if Buonarotti helped him. “Of that I have 
no doubt,’ quoth the Pope. ‘You all 
learned from him.’’ 

At all events, prompted by the great 
Florentine, Sebastiano proposed to paint 
for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici a picture of 
“The Raising of Lazarus”? in competition 
with a picture of the ‘Transfiguration”’ 
that Raphael had been commissioned to 
paint. Raphael died before his great picture 
was completed, so it is not probable that 
the Cardinal rendered a formal decision. 


- oe 


THE RAISING OF LAZARUS 





SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO (1485-1547) , Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
John XI, 43 National Gallery, London 


MORETTO 


(aL LESSANDRO BONVI- 
A CINO, more commonly called 

h i Moretto (the Moor), in allu- 
H sion to his dark complexion, 

Xt 3 was a great painter, who still 

remains comparatively obscure because of 
the fact that most of his pictures were 
painted for the religious institutions of his 
native town of Brescia, Italy, where he 
was born about the year 1498 and where 
he died about 1555. 
If he had lived for 
long in Venice, where 





THs scene of “Magdalen at the Feet 


an introducer of novelties exceptional at 
that period. His “St. Justina,” for in- 
stance, in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, 
is in some ways one of the most original 
pictures ever painted. Indeed, Moretto is 
one of the noble army of artistic martyrs, 
only in his case there was not that lack of 
technical ability which so often explains a 
failure to please. 

Being a strong designer, it follows that he 
.excelled as a deco- 
rator, and “‘the good 
Brescians, at least, 


he studied for a pe- 
riod, he would doubt- 
less have become one 
of the most famous 
of painters. As it is, 
‘his is a reputation 
which must increase 
with the years, for 
his work not only has 
a soundness quite un- 
common in northern 
Italy, but a noble, 
serious charm and 
quiet dignity as well.”’ 


of the Saviour’ is painted with a 
realism rather uncommon at the time of 
Moretto. Yet, how dignified and dis- 
tinguished is the work! Seated with 
Jesus at the table is Lazarus, while Judas 
Iscariot is bearing in food. Note the 
kneeling Mary’s eloquent facial expression 
as she anoints the Saviour’s feet and wipes 
them with her hair. The head and dress 
of the Magdalen are particularly well real- 
ized, and the hands are beautifully made, 
as are the hands and fine head of Christ. 


in Venice 


seem to have known 
and appreciated a 
man who filled their 
churches with noble 
mural adornments.” 
Notable among them 
is his ‘‘Magdalen at 
the Feet of the Sa- 
viour.”’ Equally 
strong was his grasp 
of character, as evi- 
denced in his portrait 
work. As the Abbate 
Luigi Lanzi observes, 


Contemporary with Moretto 
were Titian, the supreme young master; 
Tintoretto and Palma Vecchio. Bellini, 
an old man, was still alive; and El Greco 
was a student under Titian. Moretto may 
have known Albrecht Durer, when the 
latter made hi3 visit to Venice. The curious 
thing about Moretto, however, is that with 
all these inducements to paint in a style 
nearly approaching the Venetian, he chose 
to return to Brescia in the hills and to 
paint quite in his own manner—in cool, 
silvery tones quite different from what has 
been called the Venetian “‘golden glow.” 

Moretto is said to have tried to introduce 
something of the style of Raphael into his 
work, but their methods were quite differ- 
ent; although Raphael derived largely 
from da Vinci, as did most of his succes- 
sors in north Italy, Moretto included. 
His cool, silvery quality is nearer to what 
the moderns have come to feel is the modest 
truth of nature. That is the feeling en- 
gendered by his pictures—singular truthful- 
ness, especially for a painter of those days. 
It is also as a designer that Moretto makes 
a very strong appeal, having a wonderful 
Titianesque power of filling spaces in a 
grand manner. And he was an innovator, 


162 


‘‘Moretto, in certain respects, drew better 
than any of the Venetians. Though he did 
not have the large Venetian manner of 
massing figures, his heads are better con- 
structed and the forms are better made. 
At times, his drawing of a hand or arm 
is as precise as if done by Ingres.” 
Moretto had a peculiar feminine type 
which he was fond of painting. It persists 
through his work, usually in some angel or 
spirit rather than in the central Madonna 
of the composition. His Madonnas them- 
selves are apt to be a little tame and to 
fade, testifying to the difficulty of painting 
a woman to look at once good and beauti- 
ful and strong. 

Living and painting in solitude, this artist 
was one of the first individualists. He 
does not seem in any way to have been a 
difficult person to get along with, as was 
Michel Angelo. On the other hand, his 
childlike piety is mentioned. Apparentlyhe 
worked in a sad sincerity, and his works 
are individual simply because of the innate 
power and originality of the man. It is told 
that he was accustomed, when he had a 
highly important subject, such as the 
‘Virgin Mother,”’ to prepare himself for the 
painting by prayer and fasting. 


MARY MAGDALEN AT THE SAVIOUR’S FEET 





Brescia 


Santa Maria in Calchera, 


(1498-1555) 


MORETTO 
John XII 


_——_ =~ 


HIPPOLYTE FLANDRIN 


O less a painter than the 
4 Franco-Dutch master, Ary 
A Scheffer, on visiting the studio 
ap of Hippolyte Flandrin in Paris 
aa4 and seeing his newly painted 
“Christ Blesses Little Children,’ laying 
aside his own renown, and his years of 
success, cried to the young painter, ‘‘Ah, 
if I could only follow the road that you 
are taking, with the same sureness. Why 





Encouraged by his master, Flandrin be- 
gan painting a picture to compete for the 
Prix de Rome of 1832, having been un- 
successful in the same attempt a year 
earlier, and was entered fifth on the list. 
During the few months allotted him to 
finish the picture, the young artist was 
stricken with cholera, and when he was 
able to resume painting half the allotted 
time had expired. Nevertheless, he man- 


did not I have, as 
you do, the lessons 
of Ingres—those les- 
sons that there is no 
longer time for me to 
enjoy!”’ 

Flandrin, esteemed as 
the greatest French 
religious painter since 
Le Sueur, was the 
second of three 
brothers, who all de- 
voted themselves to 
painting. During his 
childhood in Lyons, 
France, and until well 
along into youth he 
manifested no other 
artistic inclination 
than a very lively 


HRIST Blesses Little Children’ is a 

painting that is full of grace and 
charm—the divine grace of the Saviour 
who adjured his disciples to ‘Suffer little 
children, and forbid them not, to come 
unto Me; for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.” The scene is on the. shore of 
Galilee beyond Jordan, where Jesus was 
followed by a great multitude, including 
the Pharisees who were bent on tempting 
Him. It was while He was addressing 
the multitude that the children were 
brought to Him for His blessing, to the 
displeasure of the disciples at having His 
discourse interrupted. The benign ex- 
pression of the Saviour and the trusting, 


aged to finish the pic- 
ture, and it won the 
coveted prize which, 
incidentally, was the 
first one to be award- 
ed to a pupil of In- 
gres. Flandrin was 
accorded a_ public 
ovation on visiting 
Lyons, en route to 
Rome. 

The canvases that 
Flandrin sent from 
Rome to Paris during 
the time he spent in 
Italy created some- 
thing ofa furor. One 
in particular that he 
had started painting 
in Rome and brought 


taste for uniforms, 
accoutrements and 
the events of mili- 
tary life, whether in the field or in garrison. 
“He and his brothers never tired of watch- 
ing parades or soldiers at drill; and at 
night, on coming home, they would busy 
themselves sketching the fascinating mar- 
tial sights they had witnessed during the 
day.’ Asa practical result, these military 


sketches gained for them such a local | 


reputation that a sculptor named Foya- 
tier, being in Lyons in 1821, welcomed the 
lads into his studio. Hippolyte was then 
eleven years of age. 

Practicing thrift in every possible way, 
saving every sou that he could accumulate 
by making sketches for lithographers, and 
other “pot boilers,’ Hippolyte finally 
found himself in position to go to Paris 
and become a pupil of Ingres. Those who 
knew Flandrin at the time have the mem-' 
ory of a young man ‘“‘whose expression 
was dreamy and of a sweetness of mys- 
ticism, and whose speech was always 
quiet and reserved.” 


164 


adoring attitudes of the children combine 
to give this picture its deserved reputation. 


back with him to 
finish in Paris, was 
his ‘Christ Blesses 
Little Children.” First exhibited at the 
Paris Salon of 1839, it was highly praised 
not only by the critics, but by the artists 
who were then at the head of the French 
school of painting. Flandrin was the 
French counterpart of the German Naz- 
arenes, none of whom is regarded by 
Muther as his equal. His was a period 
wherein the antique in art had become so 
monotonous that people longed for variety 
of color again. Flandrin himself believed 
that ‘“‘the finest stream of life only issues 
from the streams of art and religion when 
they flow in company.” He valued the 
older painters ‘‘because they had made 
painting the true handmaid of religion.” 
He was made an officer of the Legion of 
Honor and a member of the French Academy 
in 1853. During a visit to Rome in 1864 
he fell a victim to smallpox, died after a 
brief illness, and was buried in the Paris 
Church of Saint-Germain des Pres, which 
his art had adorned. 





CHRIST BLESSING LITTLE CHILDREN 


HIPPOLYTE FLANDRIN (1809-1864) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. XIX, 13, Mark X, 14, Luke XVIII, 16 


CHARLES LE BRUN 


~@HARLES LE BRUN was one 


YH oR of the most precocious painters 
=) 





that ever lived. At the age 
of thirteen he was admitted 
into the studio of Francois 
Perrier, who was one of the foremost 
artists of France in the early part of the 
seventeenth century. While he was study- 
ing with Perrier, Le Brun painted por- 
traits of his father and of his uncle, and 


— 


atmosphere of France had proved dis- 
couraging. In Rome the younger painter 
seems to have continued his association 
with Poussin for some time. 

An interesting story is told about a pic- 
ture of his entitled ‘‘Horatius Cocles De- 
fending the Bridge.’’ It had been shown 
at a féte in Rome; the name of the painter 
being withheld, but everyone believed it to 
be by Poussin and complimented him on 


made a pen-drawing 
of Louis XIII on 
horseback. His 
father, a mediocre 
sculptor, whose pa- 
tron at the time was 
a French Minister of 
State named Seguier, 
showed this drawing 
to M. Seguier and the 
latter was so im- 
pressed by the talent 
it displayed that he 
placed the young ar- 
tist under Simon 
Vouet who, in the ab- 
sence of Nicolas Pous- 
sin in Rome, was re- 
garded as the first 
painter of France. Le 
Brun was then fifteen 
years of age. 

When shortly there- 


O* the many pictures that have been 
painted of “Christ Entering Jerusa- 
lem,” this one by the French master, 
Le Brun, painted more than two centuries 
ago, is still regarded as a masterpiece of 
pictorial art. Observe with what fidelity 
the artist has followed the scriptural text: 
“And they brought the ass, and the colt 
.. and they set Him thereon. And a 
very great multitude spread their gar- 
ments in the way; others cut down 
branches from the trees, and. strewed 
them in the way.’’ Considering the num- 
ber of figures assembled in this picture, 
their management is admirable in detail. 
Clearly discernible are certain of the dis- 
ciples whose devout attitude toward the 
Master is designed to inspire reverence in 
the throng thatattended him into Jerusalem. 


it. Knowing nothing 
about the _ picture, 
Poussin was _ per- 
plexed. One day 
Le Brun _ suggested 
that they go together 
and see this myste- 
rious canvas, evi- 
dently done by an 
imitator. Gazing at 
the picture, Poussin 
strongly expressed his 
resentment, but when 
Le Brun _ confessed 
that he was the paint- 
er, Poussin was molli- 
fied, and warmly con- 
gratulated his young 
disciple. 

After four years in 
Rome, Le Brun re- 
turned to Paris, where 
he was employed by 


after he quarrelled 

with Vouet, the boy prodigy initiated a 
succession of quarrels that make his biog- 
raphy a catalogue of conflict. Of a violently 
ambitious nature, and conscious of his 
superiority to his contemporaries, except- 
ing possibly Poussin, whose pupil he was 
to be for an important period in his de- 
velopment, he was constantly assaulting 
someone and inviting assault. Parting 
company with Vouet, Le Brun painted 
an allegory in glorification of the great 
Cardinal Richelieu, who was so taken with 
the work that he ordered three pictures 
from Le Brun, and obtained a royal au- 
dience for the impetuous young artist. 
Le Brun was still under nineteen years of 
age when he was appointed painter to 
Louis XIII of France. 

In his twenty-third year Le Brun, receiving 
a pension from the royal exchequer, set out 
for Rome in company with his master 
Nicolas Poussin, to whom the artistic 


166 


the French Minister 
of Finance, Fouquet, who gave the painter 
a pension of 12,000 livres. 
Colbert, succeeding Fouquet, recognized Le 
Brun’s ability for organization, and together 
they founded the Academy of Painting and 
Sculpture, which placed him in a domi- 
nating position—one which he had long 
sought. Later, in 1660, these two men 
founded the famous Gobelin Studios, which 
at first made not only tapestries but all kinds 
of furniture needed for the royal palaces. 
In these two dominating positions Le Brun 
exerted great influence over the art of his 
period, and his pompous and emphatic 
talent was evident in the art of the coun- 
try long after his death. 
From 1662, all of the work in the royal 
palaces was executed under Le Brun’s di- 
rection. He finished the decoration of the 
grand staircase at the Palace of Versailles, 
the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre and 
other important works, himself. 


THE ENTRY OF CHRIST INTO JERUSALEM 





CHARLES LE BRUN (1619-1690) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matthew XXI, John XII Louvre, Paris 


HERMANN PRELL 


HILE a boy in his teens 

4 Hermann Prell drew sur- 
reptitiously, in the late night 

oN hours after his father had 
gone to bed, a battle picture 

that contained upward of three hundred 
figures, and sent it to the German painter, 
Wilhelm von Kaulbach, who at that time 
was enjoying great popularity, with a 
request for his opinion. Kaulbach gave it 


: 





Prell is by no means a dexterous master of 
technique. The world will never say of his 
pictures, “‘What deftness!’’ but rather, 
‘What insight!’’ He struggles with color 
like Millet. There is a certain want of ease 
in his works. They are sometimes clumsy 
and labored, harsh and hard. A brilliant 
conversationalist and a man of mobile and 
highly strung nature, Prell possesses that 
other quality which in art stands higher 


in a terse but cordial 
sentence, ‘‘Become a 
painter.”’ 

Forthwith young 
Prell, who was born 
in Leipzig, Germany, 
in 1854, of Rhenish 
parentage, entered the 
Academy at Dresden 
at eighteen. It was 
at a time when art 
was passing through 
a period of transition 
in Germany, from 
classicism to realism 
and it was not until 
chance brought to his 
attention a painting 
by Carl Giissow that 
Prell began to find 
himself as a painter of 


RIM realism and a rare imaginative 

quality characterize Prell’s ‘Con- 
spiracy of Judas,” which is no less distin- 
guished for its landscape than for the 
three foreground figures of Judas Iscariot 
and the two chief priests with whom he is 
bargaining. It is not in Jerusalem, but 
outside the city that the dark deed is pic- 
tured. St. Matthew simply says, “Judas 
Iscariot went unto the chief priests, and 
said unto them, What will ye give me, and 
I will deliver Him unto you? And they 
covenanted with him for thirty pieces of 
silver.”’ Judas is shown struggling with 
his conscience, nervously pulling his beard, 
while one of the priests hands forth the 
money. The other priest is reassuring 
Judas as to the consequence of the deed. 


than the finest virtu- 
osity: he has honesty 
and the courage of his 
convictions. Looking 
at his works, it is 
impossible to imagine 
that he could or would 
have painted any- 
thing different from 
what, as a matter of 
fact, he has painted. 
In 1880 Prell returned 
from Italy to Berlin. 
Not long afterwards, 
while on a sketching 
trip in the Riesenge- 
birge, taken so that 
he could paint in the 
open air, he conceived 
the idea of what was 
to be a masterpiece 


power and distinction. 

Equipped with a healthy feeling for reality, 
Giissow approached nature in a sturdy and 
robust fashion that inaugurated for a brief 
period in Berlin an era of yellow kerchiefs 
and black finger-nails, and on the strength 
of them was exalted by the critics as a 
pioneer of realism or else anathematized, 
according to their aesthetic creed. From 
him Prell acquired a rugged method of 
painting muscles and flesh and clothes of 
many colors, and of setting green beside 
red and red beside yellow with a new and 
startling effect. 

His artistic development was interrupted 
in 1875 by the German compulsory military 
service law, and he was forced to put aside 
his painting and serve with the Saxon 
cavalry for a year. 

Thereafter his progress as a painter was 
rapid, and he soon realized that mural 
painting was the medium of his best and 
strongest expression. By the time he first 
visited Rome, in 1879, studio painting had 
become impossible to him. 


168 


of religious painting. , 
One evening, as he was climbing a hill- 
road to his lodging, carrying his paint- 
ing kit and tired after sketching all day, he 
suddenly saw the great eye of the full moon 
appear over the crest of a hill, as though to 
spy some secret and sinister deed. The 
grim countryside was an appropriate set- 
ting for some shocking act, and as Prell the 
next morning made a sketch of the land- 
scape, with this in mind, he introduced the 
figures of Judas, and the chief priests per- 
suading him to the betrayal. The impres- 
sion thus caught was so strong that, three 
years later, when he finished the picture, 
the landscape and atmosphere were slightly 
altered. It is hard to say which is the more 
impressive, the landscape or the figures. 
Early in his reign, the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II 
took notice of Prell, who in 1889 painted a 
portrait of him in the uniform of a German 
admiral, for which the Kaiser posed with 
patience unusual to him. Subsequently 
Prell painted three additional portraits of 
the Prussian war lord. 


_—— 


; 
a 





rr = 


. 





a 





HERMANN PRELL (1854- 
Matt. XXVI 





) 





From a Perry Picture 


LEONARDO DA VINCI 


EVER before or since in the 
annals of the human race 
H has the same passionate de- 
sire for knowledge been com- 

aad bined with the same ardent 
love of beauty, nor have artistic and 
scientific powers been united in the same 
degree as they were in Leonardo da Vinci. 
Painting was only one manifestation of 
his genius. As sculptor, architect and en- 
gineer alike he was 





illustrious in his day; V ERILY I say unto you that one of you 
shall betray Me.” 


as a philosopher and 
man of science he has 


I do not think I can express the face of a 
man who could resolve to betray his Mas- 
ter, after having received so many bene- 
fits. But to save time,’’ added Leonardo, 
“T will, in this case, seek no further; but 
for want of a better idea I will put in the 
head of the Prior.”’ The amused Duke 
advised the Prior to let Leonardo finish the 
work at his pleasure. 

Nevertheless was Leonardo constantly ac- 
cused of indolence. 
Often he made vast 
preparations and ac- 


This is the mo- complished nothing. 


been justly hailed as 
the precursor of Gali- 
leo, of Bacon and of 
Descartes. Alexander 
von Humboldt pro- 
claimed him to be the 
greatest physicist of 
the fifteenth century, 
the one man of his 
age who “‘united a re- 
markable knowledge 
of mathematics with 
the most admirable 
intuition of nature’’; 
and scholars of this 
day recognize in him, 
as did Hallam, “a 
thinker who antici- 
pated the grander 
discoveries of modern 
science.”’ 


ment in Biblical history that Leonardo da 
Vinci has dramatically re-created in “‘The 
Last Supper.” Judas (third on the Sa- 
viour’s right) is guiltily withdrawing the 
hand extended to the dish, while behind 
his isolated figure Peter passionately con- 
sults the beloved disciple John. On the 
other side, beyond the beckoning Thomas 
and the amazed apostle James, is the 
beautiful figure of Philip, whose gesture 
eloquently speaks to us, “Lord, Thou 
knowest Iam not he!”’ This, Leonardo’s 
masterpiece, has so stamped itself upon 
the imagination of the world that the 
scene can no longer be visualized in any 
other fashion. It is, like Hamlet, a fin- 
ished creation. What remains of the pic- 
ture, however, is but the pale ghost of 
what it was as originally painted. 


As John Addington 
Symonds notes, ‘‘He 
set before himself 
aims infinite instead 
of finite. His designs 
of wings to fly with 
symbolize his whole 
endeavor. He be- 
lieved in solving the 
insoluble.”’ 

To make himself rich 
or famous seems. 
never to have con- 
cerned this colossus. 
As Theophile Gautier 
says, ‘‘He labored 
only to prove to him- 
self that he was su- 
perior.”? Having cre- 
ated the one most 
beautiful of portraits, 


At an early age the 

fame of Leonardo was abroad in Italy, 
and nobles of state vied with princes of 
the church in commanding his services. 
A prodigious worker on occasion and pos- 
sessed of marvellous facility, Leonardo 
was, nevertheless, not a quick maker of 
masterpieces. In painting “The Last 
Supper,”’ for instance, his procrastination 
so aggravated the Prior that the Duke 
Lodovico Sforza was besought to repri- 
mand the artist for ‘‘“mooning about’’ in- 
stead of getting on with the work. To 
his remonstrance Leonardo gently ex- 
plained how necessary it was for artists to 
think things out before beginning to paint. 
“Two heads remain to be done,”’ he said. 
“T feel unable to conceive the beauty of 
the celestial grace that must have been 
incarnate in Our Lord. The other head 
which causes me thought is that of Judas. 


170 


the one most beautiful 
picture, the one most beautiful fresco, the 
one most beautiful cartoon, he was con- 
tent, and gave his mind to other things. 
He manufactured all the materials he used, 
even to his varnishes and colors. He in- 
vented many serviceable instruments that 
are still in use, like the saws employed to- 
day at the Carrara marble quarries. He 
designed breech-loading cannon, and dem- 
onstrated the advantages of conical bul- 
lets. He invented the camera obscura, 
forestalled Newton and Copernicus in see- 
ing that the universe was held together by 
the attraction of gravitation, and was the 
first to observe that the tides obey the 
moon. 
At the same time, Leonardo, in his ad- 
vancing age, turned from his native Italy to 
France for recognition and found a patron 
in King Francis I, in whose arms he died. 


THE LAST SUPPER 





apn hope 
ne 2 : 5 








Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan 


(1452-1519) 
V, 18, Luke XXII, 19 


LEONARDO DA VINCI 
Matt. XXVI, 26, Mark XI 


FORD MAbDox BROWN 


maSwJORD MADOX BROWN, one 
of whose distinctions is to have 
had as a pupil Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti, was never a member 
S of the Fre-Raphaelite Brother- 
hood, the aims and purposes of which are 
set forth on page 96, but he was so much 
in sympathy with them and his art was so 
akin to their own that he has become 
identified with that phase of English paint- 





Rembrandt, Titian and Tintoretto, were 
usually brown in tone, but this brownness 
was often due, not only to the pigments 
originally used by the masters, but also to 
the grime of centuries, to the “tone of 
time.’’ Seeking to be praised as ‘“‘old 
masters’’ in their own time, painters used 
artificial means to make their pictures look 
brown and give them a Rembrandtesque 
shadow. Madox Brown reversed the prac- 


ing. 

Madox Brown was 
six years the senior 
of Holman Hunt, and 
was born in Calais, 
France, at a time 
when David and the 
Classicists had im- 
posed a new artistic 
idealon France. From 
childhood, in fact, he 
was conversant with 
continental art move- 
ments—as the major- 
ity of English paint- 
ers were not— and 
after studying at 


S T. JOHN tells us that Jesus, rising 
from supper, “laid aside his garments,” 
and “took a towel and girded himself,” 
and ‘‘poured water into a basin, and be- 
gan to wash the disciples’ feet and to 
wipe them with the towel wherewith he 
was girded.”’ Then Peter said, ‘Lord, 
dost thou wash my feet? ... Thou shalt 
never wash my feet.” The humility of 
Jesus, and the veneration implied in the 
words of Peter, are splendidly and sympa- 
thetically rendered in this picture. Judas 
Iscariot is represented lacing up his san- 
dals, after his feet have been washed. 


tice by painting his 
pictures on a white 
ground, and immedi- 
ately his color became 
brighter and truer to 
Nature. 

One of his most im- 
portant works—cer- 
tainly his most im- 
portant religious pic- 
ture—was begun late 
in 1851 and occupied 
a good part of the 
following year. It is 
his ‘‘Christ Washing 
Peter’s Feet.’” Fred- 
erick Shields tells of 


Bruges, Ghent and 

Antwerp, he worked for three years in 
Paris. His desire then was to become a 
painter of large historical pictures, and in 
1844 he went to England to compete for 
a commission to decorate Westminster 
Hall. Failing in this, he proceeded to 
Rome and became acquainted with two 
curious German painters named Cornelius 
and Overbeck. Leading semi-monastic 
lives and deliberately cultivating the devo- 
tional frame of mind of the Italian mas- 
ters who preceded Raphael, they are 
credited with being the first “‘Pre-Raphael- 
ites.” 

Looking at it as they did, Madox Brown 
perceived that nature was far brighter 
than it appeared to be in the pictures of 
his British contemporaries. Since the time 
of Reynolds, Sir George Beaumont’s dic- 
tum that a good picture must be a brown 
picture had been the general opinion, and 
no English figure painters made any se- 
rious stand against it till Ford Madox 
Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites began to 
exhibit. 

The explanation of this brown-picture cult 
is simple. Painters had observed that the 
pictures by the old masters, such as 


172 


attending an exhibi- 
tion of paintings, including many works 
of the Pre-Raphaelites at Manchester, 
England, in 1857, when “‘hung at the very 
roof was a picture of such power that, 
slighted as it had been by the judges and 
unobserved by the general public, it held 
me riveted—large and simple in the com- 
position of its masses as Giotto—brilliant 
and forcible, yet true and refined in its 
color and lighting, and wonderful in its 
grasp of human character and passion. 
... Permanently confirmed was my first 
impression that, among all the English pic- 
tures of sacred subjects there, it alone was 
worthy to rank with the great Italians.” 
Apart from the intrinsic merit of the pic- 
ture in question, it is of historic interest 
in that it contains portraits of several 
members of the Pre-Raphaelites circle. The 
head of Christ is declared to be a literal 
transcript of F. G. Stephens. Of the 
Apostles, omitting Judas, the first on the 
left is William M. Rossetti, brother of 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the second, Hol- 
man Hunt; the fourth, Holman Hunt, Sr.; 
the fifth, C. B. Cayley; the sixth, Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti; and the seventh is be- 
lieved to be Christina Rossetti, as St. John. 


CHRIST WASHING PETER’S FEET 





ab 


FORD MADOX BROWN (1821-1893) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
John XIII, 6 


ANTHONY VAN DYCK 


Roe NTHONY VAN DYCK, born 
; at Antwerp in 1599, became 





a painter~ apprentice when 
but ten years old, at fifteen 
entered the studio of Peter 


YING 


Paul Rubens, and at nineteen was a mem- 
ber of the Guild of Antwerp painters, an 
honor without precedent in the case of so 


of Charles I at Whitehall, London, and so 
pleased that monarch with a large picture 
of the royal family, now in the Gallery of 
Windsor, that his fortune was made. He 
was appointed painter to the Court, re- 
ceived the honor of knighthood, and was 
granted an annuity of 200 pounds sterling. 
Horace Walpole records that Van Dyck 


young an artist. 
shown by the 
painted at this early 
stage of his career, 
notably his “‘Betrayal 
of Jesus,’ reproduced 
here. 

Incident to his associ- 
ation with Rubens, 
Van Dyck and his 
fellow students are 
said on one occasion 
to have entered the 
master’s painting 
room during his ab- 
sence: and to have 
inadvertently jostled 
and injured Rubens’ 
great ‘‘Descent from 
the Cross,’’ in course 
of completion. They 
were in consternation. 
Van Dyck was per- 


His precocity is further 
recognized masterpieces 


YAn DYCK’S “The Betrayal of Jesus’’ 
at Madrid is generally agreed by 
critics and connoisseurs to be the most 
remarkable picture of the betrayal that 
has ever been painted. It also is con- 
sidered by many to be Van Dyck’s master- 
piece. The ferocity of St. Peter, as de- 
picted, is alive with reality. With a 
terrific blow he has hewn down Malchus, 
who lies on the ground screaming in 
agony, and has dropped his heavy lantern. 
Christ stands between two old gnarled 
olive trees, from the boughs of which the 
glaring light has frightened an owl. Those 
who have seized Him have fierce and 
brutal faces, but His own is calm, radiant, 
beautiful, with the assurance of divinity. 


was sumptuously lodged at Blackfriars, 
with a summer residence placed at his 


disposal in the coun- 
try, and both the 
king and queen em- 
ployed him _ con- 
stantly. Nearly forty 
portraits of Charles I 
and more than thirty- 
five of Queen Henri- 
etta were painted by 
Van Dyck. The 
equestrian portraits 
of the king at Wind- 
sor and in the Na- 
tional Gallery, Lon- 
don; the full-length 
portrait in the 
Louvre; those of the 
queen in the galleries 
of Windsor, Petro- 
grad, Dresden, and 
several groups of the 


suaded to endeavor 

to remedy the injury to the picture. But 
the keen eye of Rubens detected the work 
of another hand, and on questioning his 
pupils was so pleased with the frank ac- 
knowledgment made by Van Dyck, and so 
well satisfied with the restoration, that he 
made no further comment on the matter. 
The arm of the Magdalen and the throat 
and chin of the Virgin are the parts said 
to have been restored by Van Dyck. 
Sojourning for a time in Genoa, Italy, 
Van Dyck, although less than twenty-five 
years old, painted fifty odd portraits still 
to be seen in the Rosso Palace and in 
Genoese galleries that are accounted among 
his masterpieces. On his return to Ant- 
werp he met with immediate favor and was 
appointed painter to the Archduchess 
Isabella. Marie de Medici, driven from 
France, visited him in his studio; and the 
Flemish, Spanish and French nobility 
coveted the honor of being painted by 
him. 

Presently, he was attracted to the Court 


royal children are ap- 
proved masterpieces. With three hundred 
and fifty of his works to point to, England 
undoubtedly can boast of the finest collec- 
tion of his paintings. 
Van Dyck was at the peak of his creative 
career at forty. From that year there is a 
perceptible decline in the quality as well 
as quantity of his work. In fact, the last 
two years of his life were spent entirely in 
travelling with his young wife, the grand- 
daughter of Lord Ruthven. M. Guiffrey 
states that excess of work, perhaps also 
excess of indulgence at the table, was the 
cause of his premature death at forty-two. 
Posterity assigns to him a place of his 
own nearer the first than second rank. 


As Fromentin, the French critic, says: 


174 


“The order of precedence which should be 
given him in the procession of great men 
has never been exactly determined, but 
since his death, as during his life, he seems 
to have retained the privilege of being 
placed near the throne, and of being a 
distinguished presence there.” 


THE BETRAYAL OF JESUS 





ANTHONY VAN DYCK (1599-1641) ; The Prado, Madrid 
Matt. XXVI, 47, Mark XIV, 45, Luke XXII, 47, John XVIII, 1 


MICHAEL MUNKACSY 


O modern painting of a religious 
subject has enjoyed the world- 
H wide fame of Munkd4csy’s 
“‘Christ Before Pilate,’’ which, 
painted in 1881, caught the 
eye of Europe on its first exhibition in 
Paris, was subsequently exhibited in most 
of the European capitals and later, in 
1886, was exhibited with equal success in 
the leading cities of the United States. 
Munkacsy, whose 
real name was Michael 
Lieb, was born at 
Munkacs, Hungary, 
in 1844, the son 
of a petty official 
who died and left 
the boy an orphan 
at. an early ‘age. 
He was apprenticed 
to a carpenter, and 
after several years 
of hard work and 
privation, chance 
threw him in the 
way of the portrait- 
painter Szamossy at 
Gyula, who aided 
and directed him in 
the fundamentals of 
. painting, as did also 
the landscape painter 
Ligeti, at Budapest, 
whither Munk4csy 
went in 1863. 

So rapidly did Munkdacsy master his 
art, under the direction of Szamossy, that 
within a year the master had imparted 
everything he knew to the pupil, who at 
the age of eighteen was giving drawing 
lessons himself and earning a livelihood. 
Achieving a local triumph with a painting 
of the entire family of a Gyula tailor, 
young Munk4acsy was encouraged to ex- 
hibit it in Budapest, and the Art-Union 
bought it for eighty florins. A small 
grant from that institution enabled him 
to study for a year at the Academy in 
Vienna, after which he proceeded to 
Munich and thence to Dusseldorf. 

Two years later his first important pic- 
ture, ‘““The Last Day of a Condemned 
Man,’’ took Paris by storm, bringing him 
the Salon gold medal. His future was forth- 
with assured, and in 1872 he established 
a residence in Paris, where for several 





bearing soldier. 


THs famous painting illustrates the 

scene described in Matthew when 
“Jesus stood before the governor: and 
the governor asked Him saying, Art Thou 
the King of the Jews?. 
unto him, Thou sayest. 
was accused of the chief priests and 
elders, He answered nothing.” 
sitting in judgment, is disposed to deal 
leniently with the accused Christ, but the 
Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who is shown 
exhorting Pilate, demands His death and 
is supported by all the chief priests and 
elders who are present. 
passionate figures in the picture are those 
of the Roman governor and the spear- 
The immense popularity 
of this picture is attributed to its dramatic 
power and to the fact that it is a familiar 
subject and “was painted for everybody.” 


176 


years he continued to depict episodes from 
the popular life of his native country with 
impressive truthfulness and a_ sombre, 
blackish coloring. Munk4csy carried off 
a second Salon medal a couple of years 
later and simultaneously married the 
young widow of a rich landed proprietor 
of the Duchy of Luxemburg. 

This accomplished, he entered upon a 
new field, painting a series of charming 
Paris interiors, in 
which he adopted a 
richer coloring, but 
his most important 
production of this 
period was ‘“ Milton 
Dictating Paradise 
Lost.”” It was not, 
however, until 1881 
that he reached his 
own ideal with the 
completion of the now 
world-famous ‘‘Christ 
Before Pilate,’’ which 
has been one of the 
most discussed pic- 
tures of recent times. 
To paint the forty 
personages that oc- 
cupy the canvas, 
which is twenty feet 
wide by twelve and 
a half feet high, a 
small army of models 
had to be kept in - 
readiness for the painter for a year or more. 
The size of the picture necessitated the 
construction of a special studio, and its 
exhibition that of a special gallery. To 
pack it, a special arrangement was in- 
vented. It had its own wagon, and was 
transported in a special railway car. 

In 1884 Munkdacsy painted his second 
Biblical subject, “Christ on Calvary,’’ like 
its predecessor replete with dramatic life, 
treated in the light of history with ethno- 


And Jesus said 
And when He 


Pilate, 


The only dis- 


graphic reality and supreme coloristic 
vigor. It also was brought to America in 
1887. His subsequent creations were of a 


decorative character, for the Art-Historical 
Museum in Vienna, and the House of 
Parliament in Budapest. The strain and 
disappointment connected with this work 
brought on a mental disease, and the artist 
passed the last three years of his life in a 
sanitarium near Bonn, Germany. 


CHRIST BEFORE PILATE 





MICHAEL MUNKACSY (1844-1900) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. XXVII, 11, Mark XV, 1, Luke XXIII, 3, John XVIII, 28 John Wanamaker, Philadelphia 


REMBRANDT 


7 SZAF the art of Rembrandt, the 
f most illuminating and pene- 
trating criticism that has yet 

dX Yi: appeared—a _ key criticism, 
which reconciles many confus- 

ing and diverse opinions—is furnished by 
Eugéne Fromentin. It is too long to give 
in its entirety, but the gist of his argument 
is that Rembrandt was two beings in one 
—the first a trained, facile and workman- 
like Dutch painter of 
his own time, essen- 


concerned with painting only by the help 
of light, to draw only with light. He has 
proved that light exists in itself, independ- 
ent of exterior form and of coloring; and 
that it can, by the force and variety of its 
usage, the power of its effects, the num- 
ber, the depth and the subtlety of the 
ideas which it may be made to express, 
become the principle of a new art. Life 
he perceived in a dream, as an accent of 
another world, which 
renders real life al- 


tially a realist; the 
second a visionary, a 
dreamer, an _ idealist 


whose ideal was 
light. 

The first of these 
Rembrandts, whom 


Fromentin has called 
the ‘‘exterior man,’’ 
possessed a clear 
mind, a _ vigorous 
hand, and _ infallible 
logic; was, indeed, the 
very opposite of the 


HIS picture illustrates the Roman 

procurator Pilate, washing his hands 
both literally and figuratively, after he 
had vainly sought to turn Barabbas over 
to the crowd, in place of Jesus of Naza- 
reth. Finding that the Jewish mob was 
to be appeased by none other than the 
person of the “‘King of the Jews,” Pilate 
ordered his page to fetch a ewer and 
water, and the page is here shown pouring 
the water over Pilate’s outstretched hands, 
while a venerable court associate looks on. 
A group of soldiers symbolizing Roman 
power may be discerned in the background. 


most cold and makes 
it seem pale; and his 
ideal, as in a dream, 
pursued with closed 
eyes, is light—the 
nimbus around ob-. 
jects, phosphores- 
cence on a_ black 
ground.”’ 

What Rembrandt 
tried to do and did 
was to place visions 
on canvas, giving 
them brilliancy and 


romantic genius so 
admired by the mod- 
ern world. Nor was this ‘exterior’? Rem- 
brandt an inferior painter. His way of 
seeing was thoroughly healthy, his manner 
of painting was admirable in directness 
and simplicity, revealing a determination 
to make his work comprehensible and 
veracious. His drawing makes one forget 
his palette, but his palette forgets nothing 
that paint is capable of expressing in the 
Rembrandt manner. In many of his por- 
traits there is no poetry, no idealism, and 
yet they are so truly seen and perfectly 
rendered as to rank among the world’s 
masterpieces. 

The other Rembrandt—the idealist, the 
dreamer—is the one most_ generally 
known and admired. He is recognized as 
a consummate master of chiaroscuro— 
and more. The meaning of the word has 
to be stretched to signify an artist who 
would ‘“‘conceive light outside of recognized 
law,’ who would attach to it an extraor- 
dinary meaning, and make great sacrifices 
to it. If such is its signification, Rem- 
brandt is at once defined and judged; for 
it expresses an idea, a rare eulogy and a 
criticism. As Fromentin says, ‘‘The whole 
career of Rembrandt, the dreamer, is 


preserving their frag- 
ile texture, and yet to 
do masculine and substantial work, as 
real as any other. When this dreamer of 
light “‘used it appropriately, when he 
used it to express what no other painter 
in the world has expressed, when, in a 
word, he accosts with his dark lantern the 
world of the marvellous, of conscience, the 
ideal, then he has no peer, because he has 
no equal in the art of showing the in- 
visible.”’ 

To Fromentin the principal interest of the 
famous ‘“‘Night Watch”’ is in the fact that 
it is to him a clear evidence of struggle— 
a battle-ground which marks the progress 
of the reconciliation that was. most nearly 
effected in his later picture of “The 
Syndics.”’ 

“Hang these pictures in a very strong 
light,’’ Rembrandt said in his youth, when 
speaking of his ‘“‘Passion”’ series. As age 
came upon him he kept the critics more 
at a distance. ‘The smell of paint is not 
good for the health,”’ we read of his saying 
to one of a group of visitors who came too 
close to his easel. His domestic troubles 
served to heighten and deepen his art, and 
perhaps his best work was done under stress 
of circumstances. 


REMBRAND 
Matthew XXVII, 24 


PILATE 





T VAN RIJN (1606-1669) 


WASHING HIS HANDS 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 
New York City 


TITIAN 


— 


Oz 


oy, 


ITIAN, whose real name was 
Tiziano Vecelli, is regarded by 
Ruskin as “‘the greatest painter 
who ever lived’’; and Hazlitt, 
who would ‘enjoy Raphael’s 





y, 


DS 


pictures in a collection to look at occasion- 


ally,’ confesses that ‘‘Titian’s are the 
only ones that I would wish to have hang- 
ing in the same room with me for com- 
pany.” This, of course, is superlative 
praise; but there is 
no division of critical 
opinion as to Titian 
being the greatest 
painter of the great 
Venetian school. 
Living to be nearly 
a hundred years old, 
he was born at Pieve, 
Cadore, in the Veéne- 
tian Alps, in 1477,and 
as a boy of eleven ob- 
tained his first artis- 
tic employment. in 
Venice as a_house- 
painter—not in the 
modern sense of the 
term, but as it was 
understood at a time 
when the great nobles 
adorned their palace exteriors with fres- 
cos. As a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, the 
young Titian probably acquired that love 
for color and knowledge of its effects which 
became the predominant characteristic of 
his art. All his life Titian appears to have 
been favored by the great, and early in his 
career he numbered not only dukes and 
princes, but kings, popes and emperors 
among his patrons and correspondents. 
It was while he was in attendance at the 
brilliant court of the Duke of Ferrara, in 
1516, when he lodged in the ducal castle, 
receiving weekly rations of ‘‘salad, salt 
meat, oil, chestnuts, tallow candles, 
oranges, cheese and five measures of wine,” 
that Titian was commissioned to paint his 
great ‘“‘Assumption of the Virgin,’’ shown 
elsewhere in this volume. 

Of his private life little is known, other 
than that his wife died in 1530, after hav- 
ing borne him three children—two sons, 
one of whom was a mediocre painter, the 
other a scapegrace, and his beautiful 
daughter Lavinia, whom Titian has immor- 
talized on canvas. His greatest patron, 


TITIAN was sixty-six years of age when 
he painted his great “Ecce Homo’’. 
The surface of this picture of Christ be- 
fore the people sings with color. In its dis- 
passionateness, however, it becomes less 
an expression of the submission of Christ 
than an exaltation of the imperial power 
that has Him in charge and for the mob that 
cries for His blood. The architectural 
surroundings are magnificent. 
wonderful details, as in the howling boy 
at the left and the white form of a girl 
caught in the throng. Her sudden appari- 
tion as an element of relief and mystery 
anticipates by nearly a century a similar 
device in Rembrandt’s “Night Watch.” 


180 


the Emperor Charles V, was acquired about 
that time, and we soon hear of him being 
created a Count Palatine of the Empire, 
likewise a Knight of the Golden Spur, with 
many privileges, one of which was the right 
of entrance to the Imperial Court at any 
time. Presently he was granted a pension 
which seems not to have been paid for 
many years, although he “‘bombarded the 
imperial treasury with letters.’”’ Much of Ti- 
tian’s work seems to 
have been paid for in 
this unsatisfactory 
manner, occasioning 
him many heartburn- 
ings and disappoint- 
ments, although _his- 
tory records him the 
most fortunate paint- 
er who ever lived. 
Titian received sev- 
eral invitations to 
Rome, but he does 
not appear to have 
gone there until he 
was nearly seventy, 
when he was received 
with great distinction 
by Pope Paul III. 
He lodged in the 
Belvidere; and Vasari, with whom he had 
become acquainted in Venice, undertook to 
show him the sights of the city. He met 
Michel Angelo, whose good opinion of his 
work Vasari has reported. 

We next hear of him crossing the Alps to 
join Charles V at Augsburg. Describing 
the scene of his departure from Venice, a 
biographer recounts how “every one tried 
to gain possession of some small work of 
his, thinking that henceforth he would not 
deign to paint for any one but the Em- 
peror.”’ At Augsburg he not only painted 
the fine portrait of Charles V on the field 
of Muhlberg, but portraits of many princely 
personages. The chief object of his call to 
Augsburg, however, was to paint the 
portrait of Philip II of Spain. His industry 
to the very last was amazing. Vasari found 
him as late as 1566 with the brushes still in 
his hand; and even in 1574, when he was 
ninety-seven years of age, he was able to 
receive Henry III of France with his wonted 
magnificence. In his ninety-ninth year 
Titian fell a victim to the plague which 
desolated Venice in 1576. 


There are 


ECCE HOoOMmMo 





TITIAN (1477-1576) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
John XIX, 5 Imperial Gallery, Vienna 


JEAN BERAUD 


Jean Béraud, artistic interpreter 

Ni of Parisian elegance, who has 

found material for numerous 

a pictures in the blaze of the 

theatres, the naked shoulders of ballet-girls, 

the dress-coats of old gentlemen, the 

evening humor of the boulevards or the 

bustle of Monte Carlo, should have painted 

the most provocative and impressive 
“Road to Calvary”’ 


T is an odd commentary that - 


were content with the emblem of “Isaac, 
who bore the wood as one carries a cross on 
his shoulders.’”’ There is not the least 
trace of the so-called ‘‘Stations of the Cross’”’ 
in the early times. They seem to have 
originated with Martin K6tzel, of Niirem- 
berg, no earlier than 1477. He had visited 
Jerusalem, and what is traditionally known 
as the Via Dolorosa, and he commissioned 
Adam Kraft, a friend of Diirer, to paint 

seven scenes, ending 


done in recent time. DISAVOWING any intention of painting i a crucifixion, at 
For all his choice a scene that was enacted in Jerusalem Places on the road 
of gayer subjects, two thousand years ago, Jean Béraud has, etween his house and 
Béraud, a pupil of on the other hand painted a “Road to the: Chur ees 
Léon Bonnat, was a & John. The seven 


spiritual descendant 
of Gustave Courbet, 
and an art brother of 
Alfred Stevens. 
Essentially Béraud 
has believed realism 
to be democratic art, 
which “‘can only exist 
by the representation 
of things which the 
artist can see and 
handle. For painting 
is an entirely physical 
language, and an ab- 
stract, invisible, non- 
existent object does 
not come within its 
province. Grand 
painting stands in contradiction to our 
social conditions, and most ecclesiastical 
painting in contradiction to the spirit of the 
century. It is nonsensical for painters to 
dish up themes in which they have no 
belief, themes which could only have 
flourished in some epoch other than our 
own. Human passions, motives and emo- 
tions, however, do not change with the 
passing centuries. In depicting Christ on 
the path to Calvary I have not imagined a 
scene enacted precisely two thousand years 
ago, but such a scene as might be enacted 
today.” 

Apropos of this great Biblical subject, 
Canon Farrar suggests that love of horror 
led the Renaissance painters to aggravate 
and exaggerate every incident they did not 
invent, among them, what are known 
as ‘‘The Stations of the Cross.’’ Early 
Christians, when they had come to counte- 
nance the representation of such scenes, 


lamented him.” 


Calvary” as it would appear if the events 
had occurred today in France. 
illustrates St. Luke XXIII, 27: “And there 
followed him a great company of people, 
and of women, which also bewailed and 
The _ sinister-looking 
figure just ahead of Christ in this imagina- 
tive work is that of Ignorance, and immedi- 
ately behind Him are figures symbolizing 
Intolerance, Violence and Hate. 
ionably gowned woman laughs; her poorer 
but more merciful sisters weep. A phani- 
saical professor points to Christ as to a 
target to be stoned by his boy pupils, as 
contrasted with a group of schoolgirls 
kneeling reverently in the foreground. 


182 


original stations were: 
1. Christ bearing the 
cross. 2. He falls. 
3. He meets the Vir- 
gin. 4. He falls again. 
5. St. Veronica lends 
Him the _ handker- 
chief. 6. He falls a 
third time. 7. The 
entombment. 

In the earlier repre- 
sentations (as in the 
Catacombs) the cross 
is a mere symbol. It 
becomes in later pic- 
tures a monstrous and 
impossible structure 
which no man could 
ever carry. The Gospels do not say that 
Jesus fell or fainted under the cross at all. 
Probably, as Canon Farrar further says, 
“the only reason why Simon of Cyrene was 
made to bear it, was because Jesus was too 
much weakened by long hours of insult and 
agony to keep pace with the Roman sol- 
diers—to whom a crucifixion was an every- 
day event. The Gospels state simply that 
Christ was ‘led away’ to be crucified. The 
notion of His being dragged by ropes, and 
beaten along, is a wholly apocryphal 
invention.” 

Of two pictures of the subject painted by 
Béraud,; the one we reproduce was exhibited 
in the Paris Salon of 1912. Béraud was 
born in St. Petersburg, now Petrograd, 
Russia, of French parentage, in 1849. 
It was upon the conclusion of the 
Franco-Prussian War, in which he served 
with distinction, that he entered the 
atelier of Bonnat, his one and only master. 


The artist 


A fash- 


THE ROAD TO CALVARY 


Recs 





ae 





JEAN BERAUD (1849- ) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 


Matt. XXVII, 31, Mark XV, 20, Luke XXIII, 26, John XIX, 17 


Salon of 1912 


EL GRECO 


O longer ago than in the eigh- 
teen eighties, apart from a 
H most restricted group’ of 
painters in Paris, El Greco 
aad (The Greek) was hardly more 
_ than a name even to historians of art. To- 
day he is everywhere regarded as one of 
the greatest artists of all time, having 
achieved the high honor of a classification 
and is called the ‘‘supreme example of the 
baroque in painting.”’ 
Domenico  Theoto- 
copuli, which was his 
real name, was born 
of Greek parents on 
the island of Crete in 
1545, went to Venice 
as a young man of 
twenty-five and is 
thought to have 
worked there for a 
time under Titian. 
About 1575 he mi- 
grated to Spain: and 
settled at Toledo, 
where he became af- 
fected by the great re- 
ligious fervor which 
was then agitating 
that country. The 
first work of importance on which he was 
engaged in Spain seems to have been a 
religious picture for the Cathedral of 
Toledo, then in course of construction and 
of which he was for a time the architect. 
In his capacity of architect he designed and 
carved the retable in which the picture 
. was hung and for which he was paid 182 
ducats more than for the picture itself. 
Indeed, El Greco in his lifetime was more 
highly esteemed as an architect and sculp- 
tor than as a painter, and designed several 
churches and admirable monuments. His 
most important structure was the church 
and monastery of the Bernardine monks 
at San Domenico di Silvos, of which he 
executed the whole—architecture, sculp- 
ture and painting. 
El Greco seemed to take delight in dis- 
torting natural forms. There is violent 
movement in his compositions, a strident 
boldness in his coloring. Something sav- 
age, brutal even, characterizes his art and, 
as Dr. Muther notes, “‘his deep earnest- 
ness gives grandeur to terrible things.” 
By a curious coincidence the tercen- 





wounded side, 


N its imaginative appeal this depic- 

tion of “Christ on the Cross’ is a 
supreme work of art. 
Christ that El Greco paints, but a curt- 
ously emaciated figure, over whose head 
is a tablet bearing the ironical inscription 
which is translated to read, “‘This is Jesus 
the King of the Jews.” 
in the picture are using their hands to 
catch the blood that streams from the 
and from the impaled 
hands and feet of the Saviour. 
foot of the cross are the two Marys, near 
whom is Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man 
who begged and obtained the body of Jesus 
for burial “in his own new tomb.” 


184 


tenary of El Greco was celebrated in 1914, 
when the whole of Europe was in turmoil 
and men were hating and thinking of 
violence. To a _ generation excited by 
war the suppressed violence of E] Greco’s 
pictures was irresistibly attractive. Some 
very advanced critics and ultra-progressive 
painters have found in his neurotic tem- 
perament their ideal old master. 

El Greco is reputed to have held that 
color was of far more 
importance than form 
or drawing, and if 
this belief was once 
regarded as ‘“‘a curi- 
ous anticipation of 
modern ideas,’’ these 
“‘modern ideas’’ are 
themselves now out 
of date, drawing and 
design being now 
generally accepted as 
the foundation of all 
good art. 

A reason for the long 
neglect suffered by 
El Greco after his 
death in 1625 is that 
his pictures were rele- 
gated to the lumber 
rooms of Spanish palaces and monasteries; 
many of them have been lost or painted 
over beyond recognition. They were not 
generally admired when they were painted, 
and, as Justin Blake surmises, ““when the 
discerning patron who ordered a picture, 
either for himself or for the church, died, 
the scandal was hushed up and the picture 
hidden away.”’ It was not long ago that 
an El Greco, if one could be found, could 
be had for a few dollars. One purchased 
in 1885 for twenty dollars would bring 
more than that in thousands now. 

It was in France among the artists that 
the modern appreciation of El] Greco was 
born. Manet, who traveled in Spain in 
1865, was among the first to recognize the 
artistic value of hiswork. Théodore Duret 
was with Manet in Toledo and after having 
been shown some of the pictures, bought 
several El Grecos. Mullet owned one 
which later became the property of Dégas. 
The rapid spread of the belated recognition 
accorded El Greco is amazing, in view of 
the fact that in his work there is little of 
the quality that bids for popularity. 


It is not a robust 


The three angels 


At the 





EL GRECO (1545-1625) 
Matt. XXVII, Mark XV, Luke XXIII, John XIX 


Prado, Madrid 


RUBENS 


ETER PAUL RUBENS has, 
among other distinctions, that 
of having painted about fif- 
teen hundred pictures, un- 
doubtedly the greatest output 
numerically that ever issued from one hand. 
To approach him it would be necessary 
to multiply the lives of several painters 
most fertile in productiveness; and if the 





country seat in Belgium, and in them may 
be traced not only a love of beauty in 
nature, but the pride of the landowner in 
a handsome and well-ordered estate. — 

Heir as he was of the great Venetians in 
his painted decorations, Sir William Orpen 
reminds us, Rubens was a pioneer in all 
other directions. His portraits, for in- 
stance, were the inspiration of Van Dyck 
and the English painters of the eighteenth 


importance, the dimensions and the com- 


plicated character of 
his works be consid- 
ered independently of 
their number, the 
spectacle, as Eugéne 
Fromentin exclaims, 
is ‘“‘astounding, and 
gives the most lofty, 
even, one might say, 


the most religious 
idea of human facul- 
ties.”’ 


Passions, attitudes of 
the body, expressions 
of countenance—all 
mankind in the mul- 
tifarious incidents of 
the great drama of 
life—passed through 
his brain, took from 


HE Descent from the Cross,”’ Rubens’ 

masterpiece, is a supreme depiction of 
noble suffering. Everything is as restrained 
and concise as a page of Scripture. “Here,” 
observes Fromentin, ‘are neither gesticula- 
tions, nor cries, nor horrors, nor excessive 
tears; scarcely a sob bursts from the 
Virgin; the intensity of her suffering is 
expressed only by a gesture, by a face 
bathed in tears. That of the Magdalen is 
the best done figure in the picture, the 
most delicate, the most personal, one of 
the best that Rubens ever created. The 
Christ ...no one can forget the effect of 
that long body, with the small head fallen 
to one side, so vivid and so limpid in its 
pallor, whence all pain has passed away.” 


century, his land- 
scapes anticipated 
Hobbema and the 
“natural painters” of 
England and _  Hol- 
land; while in pictures 
like “Le Jardin 
d’Amour” and “The 
Dance of the Villag- 
ers” he is credited 
with having invented 
a new style of pas- 
toral with small fig- 
ures which Watteau 
and other later artists 
developed delight- 
fully. 

Once on a time the 
twenty-one pictures 
painted by Rubens 


it stronger features, 
more robust forms, 
became amplified, but not purified, and 
transfigured into a heroic mould. Even 
when the work of other hands is seen in 
his canvases—and his collaborators in 
painting were comparable to the number 
of anonymous writers who assisted Alex- 
andre Dumas—he manages to stamp all 
with the directness of his character, the 
warmth of his blood, the magnificence of 
his vision. ‘‘There is a glory, a trumpet- 
call, in his grossest works. His was the 
special gift of eloquence. His language, to 
define it accurately, is what is called ora- 
torical. When he improvises he is not at 
his best; in restraint he is magnificent.” 

It has been said that there are landscapes 
that soothe and calm the spirit, and land- 
scapes that exhilarate. Those by Rubens 
come under the latter category. He was 
no mystic in his attitude toward nature; 
he approached her without awe, with the 
friendly arrogance of a strong man who 
respects strength. Most of his landscapes 
were painted in the neighborhood of his 


186 


for the Luxembourg 
Palace and for many 
years badly hung in the Louvre were 
abused as ‘“‘those big bad pictures by Ru- 
bens.” This was due solely to the fact 
that they were placed in such a position 
as to foreshorten the figures to the eye of 
the spectator. Since their removal to 
their present room painters and critics 
cannot find enough to say in praise of 
them. ‘Have,’ asks J. C. Van Dyke, 
“the pictures themselves undergone any 
change? Not in the least. They are merely 
seen from a proper distance—the distance 
they were intended to be seen from.” 

If to be always congenially and successfully 
employed constitutes happiness, Rubens 
should have been one of the happiest of 
men. It was his custom to rise at dawn, 
begin the day by hearing mass, and then to 
his easel. While painting he could converse 
without interfering with his work, at which 
he kept until twilight. Being addicted to 
gout, he ate and drank sparingly. In his 
sixty-fifth year this great Flemish painter 
died and was buried in Antwerp. 


THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS 





PETER PAUL RUBENS (1577-1640) ; Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. XXVII, Mark XV, Luke XXIII, John XIX Antwerp Cathedral 


FRANCIA 


RANCESCO DI MARCO GI- 
4 ACOMO RAIBOLINI, com- 
monly called Francia, was an 
artisan, as well as an artist, in 
“ that he was a maker of jew- 
elry and a founder of type. He was, 
indeed, the first to produce for the great 
printer, Aldus Manutius, the famous italic 
type, which was so highly prized, even in 
the fifteenth century, that a special letter 





1 64 2 = 


ductions bear the signature of ‘Francia 
Pictor.”’ 

Having become an established painter of 
repute in 1499, Francia did not lack work. 
Orders began pouring in upon him and, ac- 
cording to Vasari, there soon was hardly a 
church in Bologna that could not boast a 
picture from his hand. He also found time 
to paint many altar-pieces for churches in 
neighboring towns, some of which are to 


of papal privilege 
was given to Aldus 
granting him the sole 
right to its use—a 
privilege, however, 
which did not prevent 
its being copied 
throughout Christen- 
dom. 

Not until he was past 
thirty did this mas- 
ter, Francia, of the 
school of Bologna, 
turn his attention to 
painting. His con- 
verter was one Lo- 
renzo Costa, his ju- 


HIS noble “Pieta,”’ as most pictures 

are called which portray mourning 
over the dead body of Christ, was painted 
originally for a church in Lucca, Italy. 
“No picture,” writes Julia Cartwright, 
“has ever been more frequently copied. 
This is due not only to the richness of 
coloring and fine balance of composition, 
but to the purity and tenderness of feeling 
which the painter-goldsmith reveals.” The 
dead Christ rests on His mother’s knees, 
but instead of the usual saints, Mary has 
for attendants two angels robed in red 
and green, one reverently supporting the 


be seen in the prin- 
cipal galleries of Eu- 
rope. 

The sacking of Bo- 
logna early in the 
sixteenth century by 
Pope Julius II cost 
Francia an esteemed 
patron in the person 
of the Duke Benti- 
vogli, who was driven 
from power and ex- 
iled, but gained him 
a greater one in the 
Pope himself, who 
made him Director 
of the Mint of Bo- 


nior, who visited Bo- 
logna in 1483 and 
shared a studio with 
Francia, ‘‘one executing goldsmith com- 
missions on the ground floor, while, above, 
Costa was engaged in painting pictures.” 
“Of the two,’ writes Dr. Williamson, 
“Costa had the greater imagination, the 
wider knowledge, a larger love of nature 
and more accuracy in drawing; but Francia 
was by far the grander colorist, the more 
deeply religious man of the two, and pos- 
sessed more innate refinement. ... Soon 
Francia surpassed his friend, producing 
works that were much finer in conception, 
coloring and refinement than Costa could 
ever have executed.”’ 

Dr. Williamson is inclined to the belief 
that a ‘‘Crucifixion,’? now in the Library 
at Bologna, is the earliest picture by 
Francia that has come down to us. In the 
Borghese Gallery is a St. Stephen, a single 
kneeling figure, which is held to be one of 
the first pictures of this pioneer painter, 
as are three pictures of the Madonna and 
Child—one in Berlin, another in Munich, 
and a third at Pressburg. Francia was 
accustomed to signing his pictures ‘‘Fran- 
cia Aurifex,’’ whereas his goldsmith pro- 


188 


head, the other reverently folding his logna, and later, 
hands at the feet of the Saviour. strangely enough, 
“save him _— entire 

charge of the provision of money for the 


Cty 

Of Francia’s private life not much is 
known beyond the fact that he had twe 
sons, both of whom became artists. He 
is said to have had no less than two hundred 
pupils in his heyday, one of whom was 
Timoteo Viti, believed by some authori- 
ties to have been Raphael’s first master. 
Indeed, the great Raphael once sent in care 
of Francia a picture of St. Cecilia for a 
church in Bologna, asking him to see to 
its proper erection and “begging him to 
repair any injury that might be found on 
the painting, or any defect, if such might 
strike him on seeing the work.’’ There 
exists the copy of a letter, said to have 
been written by Francia to Raphael, as 
well as of a sonnet said to have been com- 
posed by him in praise of Raphael; but 
the originals have never been produced 
and their authenticity 1s questioned. At 
the age of sixty-seven Francia suffered a 
stroke of apoplexy, and is thought to 
have been buried in the Church of San 
Francesco, Bologna. 





FRANCIA (1450-1517) National Gallery, London 
Matt. XXVIII, Mark XV, Luke XXIII, John XIX 


JEAN-JACQUES HENNER 


svg Y reviving “the forgotten art of 
NM painting velvety, soft flesh and 
CCA of making it vibrate in light,” 
Jean-Jacques Henner—known 
as the Alsatian Correggio—has 
won for himself an important place in 
modern painting. The key to his secret 
way of rendering the tint and tender 
softness of flesh as delicately as possible, 
and at the same time to illumine and in- 


S, 






§ 


was first strongly attracted to religious sub- 
jects, and ‘“‘like the great Basle master, 
Henner made a solemn vow always to for- 
get himself entirely in the subject to be 
painted.” 

Going to Paris at nineteen, with sixty 
francs to his name, Henner was admitted 
to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with his first 
exhibited drawing, The sixty francs lasted 
forty days. He became alarmed, left the 


tensify the clear flesh 
tone, was found by 
the painter at that 
time of evening, 
which might be called 
Henner’s hour, when 
the landscape, over- 
shadowed by the twi- 
light, gradually loses 
color, and only a 
small blue space in 
the sky or a silent 
forest lake still pre- 
serves the reflection 
of vanishing daylight. 
As Muther notes, ‘‘In 
this tranquil harmony 
of nature after sun- 
set, the white pallor 
of the human body 
seems to have ab- 


[t was such work as his “Magdalen at 
the Tomb’’ that earned for Henner the 
sobriquet of the Alsatian Correggio. For 
few, if any, painters since Correggio— 
other than Rembrandt—have shown such 
mastery in painting flesh that is fairly in- 
candescent. This figure of Mary at the 
tomb of the Saviour, for instance, appar- 
ently gives forth light rather than receives 
it. What poetry is in the attitude, and 
what charm in the silhouette! A miracle 
is being wrought somewhere, and whether 
it is for better or for worse, Mary is trust- 
ful and resigned. That the hand that 
fashioned this marvel of delicate art could 
paint great battle pictures is one of the 
unaccountable anomalies of genius. 


academy and began 
to work for his living 
until he could afford 
to live for his work. 
For eighteen months 
he existed by paint- 
ing portraits for 
which he was paid, 
according to size, five, 
ten or fifteen francs. 
From time to time, 
in after years of fame 
and fortune, the art- 
ist was accustomed 
to buy back these 
portraits whenever 
he could locate them 
—paying sums which 
allowed for a generous 
accumulation of com- 
pound interest. 


sorbed all the day- 

light and to be giving it forth again, while 
the surrounding landscape is already merg- 
ing in colorless shadow.”’ 

Henner was born at Bernwiller, Alsace, in 
1829, and, we read, had hardly mastered 
the art of walking when he was discovered 
trying, in spite of paternal remonstrances, 
to cover a barn door with pictures. At 
an early age he was placed under a mas- 
ter, Charles Goutzwiller, at Altkirch, to 
whose early training he owed much. Later 
he was sent to the School of Art at Strass- 
burg, conducted by Gabriel Guérin; and 
there the boy of fifteen, timid and of a 
rustic awkwardness, displayed a tireless 
and amazingly premature energy for work. 
He would remain mute in the class for 
whole days, drawing with patient eager- 
ness and never laying down pencil or 
chalk, except to absorb the advice being 
given by the master to tlie most advanced 
pupils, who were already painting. 

It was by his study of the work of Hol- 
bein, at the Basle Museum, that Henner 


190 


Once, it is related, 
Henner was recalled to Bernwiller by the 
sudden death of his sister. At sight of her 
body lying motionless on a wide bench, 
the pale face showing through the folds 
of the simple shroud, the painter wept 
convulsively. Presently, mastering his 
grief, ‘che took his brushes and drew the 
scene with a feverish hand, just as he saw 
it, without any additions, in its rustic 
orderliness, with the crucifix and holy 
water on a chair, a lighted taper at the 
head of the lifeless girl, and, kneeling by 
her side, the mother buried in: silent and 
terrible meditation.’””’ The sketch was 
never finished. 
During the Crimean War, Henner found 
it impossible to obtain a canvas large 
enough for a battle picture. So he turned 
to the great barn at home, and on a door 
five yards high and three yards wide, he 
painted a battle-scene, based solely upon 
news reports, that attracted admiring 
throngs of spectators in sabots from all 
the country ’round. 


MARY MAGDALEN AT THE SAVIOUR’S TOMB 





JEAN JACQUES HENNER (1829-1905) Metropolitan Museum of Art 
New York City 


BOUGUEREAU 


IKE many another artist, 
William Adolph Bouguereau 
was thwarted, at the begin- 
ning of his career, by his 

; family, excepting his mother. 
His father, who was a wine and oil mer- 
chant, first at La Rochelle, France, and 
afterwards at Bordeaux, wished him to 
follow in his commercial footsteps, but the 
lad had a penchant for painting, or rather 
for pencilling pic- 
tures on wine bar- 





, 


tion.’’ That was Assisi. Its art treasures 
he copied with enthusiasm, as he did later 
the disentombed frescos at Pompeii which, 
on returning to France, “he often traced 
upon the walls and ceilings of his home. 
They were so true, so exact, that the 
sculptor, Edmond About, declared to his 
pupils, ‘If you do not know Pompeii, go 
see it in the studio of Bouguereau.’ ”’ 

For more than half a century this French 
master never failed to 
exhibit at every Salon 


rels and boxes, until, 


as one biographer 
says, ‘‘finally some of 
the customers and 


friends of his father 
became greatly inter- 
ested in the blond 
youth of sixteen who, 
perched all day on a 
high stool in the 
counting house, only 
left the pen for the 


HIS “‘Holy Women at the Tomb of 

Christ,’”’ Bouguereau finished in 1890 
and exhibited at the Paris Salon. ‘“‘Never,”’ 
says Maurice Albert, “was the artist more 
serious, more desperately impeccable. .. . 
What a severe arrangement of figures, 
and what impassibility! And yet,” he goes 
on to say, “that high and mighty door of 
masonic architecture would scarcely repre- 
sent the opening to the little vault of 
Joseph of Arimathea. ... Nor in the three 
figures, whose discreet tears do not impair 


religious, genre or 
mythological pictures 
and portraits, besides 
mural decorations for 
houses, theatres and 
churches. 

Never-ending labor in 
an enormous produc- 
tion almost entirely 
filled the life of Bou- 
guereau. During the 
siege of Paris, how- 


pencil.” 

At length his father 
allowed him to enter 
the Ecole des Beaux- 
Arts of Bordeaux— 
with the express condition that he was 
not to become a painter, for that was a 
trade which did not pay. Thus the young 
life of Bouguereau was illuminated by the 
odd hours given to his beloved art, and 
thus, too, we hear of him presently win- 
ning the first prize for “‘painting the fig- 
ure,’ in spite of the fact that his com- 
petitors were all-day students, while he was 
in the studio only two hours each morning. 
By the secret aid of his mother he was, 
at twenty-one, entered, along with Caba- 
nel, Henner and Gustave Moreau, whose 
works are represented in this volume, as 
a pupil of Picot in Paris. ‘There we find 
him “overflowing with enthusiasm, and 
spending not more than twenty sous a 
day, eating hardly anything but bread and 
cheese, and often going without any 
dinner.”’ 

Four years later he was awarded the Prix 
de Rome, and of his stay in Italy we read 
that the cities of Tuscany and Umbria re- 
mained with him as the most vibrant of 
memories. “One city, fairly perfumed with 
mystic art and holy traditions, particu- 
larly exerted upon him an intense fascina- 


their calm and gracious modern faces, can 
one recognize the Galilean Mary Magda- 
len, Salome and Mary Cleophas.” 


192 


ever, he abandoned 
the brush for the 
bayonet, and ‘“‘served 
his country with pa- 
triotic vigor.”’ 
Admitted to be a consummate draughts- 
man, Bouguereau is yet charged by detrac- 
tors, such as Dr. Muther, with a lack of sin- 
cerity in his painting, resulting in a sug- 
gestion of exaggeration in much of hiswork. 
Following the Franco-Prussian War, when 
the painters of France were invited to 
exhibit at Berlin, Bouguereau, who was 
almost alone in accepting, declared, “If I 
have to go to Berlin by myself, I shall go. 
I consider it a patriotic duty to conquer 
the German painters in the very capital of 
the German Empire.”’ 

Bouguereau lost his first wife soon after 
their marriage. His: second wife was 
Elizabeth Gardner, of Exeter, New Hamp- 
shire, a painter of recognized ability who 
had been one of his pupils in the Julian art 
schools. Influenced by his American wife, 
he was instrumental in causing the Julian 
studios and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to 
admit women as students to their classes. 
Bouguereau died in 1905, an octogenarian, 
after so short an illness that it may be 
said of him as of the great masters of the 
Renaissance — ‘“‘he died with the brush in 
his hand.”’ 


THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE SEPULCHRE 





& 


WILLIAM ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU (1825-1905) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Matt. XXVIII, 1, Mark XVI, 1, Luke XXIV, 1 Antwerp Museum 


EUGENE BURNAND 





to what he has the power of 
doing,’’ said Goethe once to 
4 Eckermann, adding, ‘‘most 
artists want to do more than 


valk 


BEC 


they can, and are only too ready to go 
beyond the limits which nature has set to 


their talent.’”’ If this is so, the Swiss 
painter, Eugene Burnand, is an exception 


AN artist rarely confines himself. 


sized, creation of this kind were impossible. 
Landscapes which seem to have been 
studied in another world he peoples with 
beings who pass their lives in contem- 
plation of the divine. Women and chil- 
dren, young men and grey-beards live and 
love and labor as though in an age that 
knows nothing of the stroke of the clock, 
and which might be yesterday or a thou- 


that proves the rule. 
never began to paint 
a picture that he did 
not finish, and his am- 
bition never prompted 
him to attempt a sub- 
ject beyond his ca- 
pacity to execute. 

Burnand, who was 
born at Moudon, 
Switzerland, in 1850, 
was a pupil of Menn 
and of the French 
master, Léon Géréme. 
Still living, at this 
writing, he has de- 
voted himself princi- 
pally to landscape, 
portrait and historical 
painting, and has exe- 
cuted notable pictures 
in all three depart- 
ments. There was a 
time when Burnand 
shared with another 


For, it is said, he sand years ago. 
BEING informed by Mary Magdalen 

that the stone had been removed from 
the door of the sepulchre in which the 
body of Christ had been placed after the 


crucifixion, and that, according to the Gos- 


pel of John, “They have taken away the 
Lord out of the sepulchre,” the disciples 
Peter and John “ran both together: and 
the other disciple did outrun Peter, and 
first came to the sepulchre.” Volumes 
could not describe this scene more clearly 
and impressively than is done in this pic- 
ture. Young John, the disciple particu- 
larly beloved of Christ, has his hands 
clasped prayerfully, as he races beside the 
older grizzled disciple. They have just 
come in sight of the sepulchre and can see 
that its door is ajar! The militant, impet- 
uous character of Peter is admirably por- 
trayed. It was Peter, as John admits, who 
first entered the sepulchre, although John 


Rendering historical 
episodes by colors and 
gestures, Burnand 
came as a man of fine 
and austere talent, 
often Virgilian in his 
sense of repose, mon- 
astic in his abnegation 
of petty superficial 


allurements, despite 
special attempts at 
chromatic. effect. 


A feeling for style, in 
the sense in which it 
was understood by 
the old painters, is 
everywhere evident in 
his work, and a han- 
dling of line and com- 
position in the grand 
manner which has 
earned him a high 
place as an artist. 

Plants, trees and 
rocks are to Burnand 


naturalized French 
artist, Hans von 
Marées, an antipathy 
to painting from the 
model. He scoffed at those who would 
only reproduce existing fact, and thus, in 
a certain sense, reduplicate nature, accord- 
ing to Goethe’s saying: ‘If I paint my 
mistress’ pug-dog true to nature, I have 
two pugs, but never a work of art.’”’ For 
this reason Burnand has never used models 
for the purpose of detailed pictorial studies; 
and just as little has he been at pains to 
fix situations in his mind by pencil sketches 
to serve as notes; for, according to his 
view, the direct use of motives, as they are 
called, is only a hindrance to free artistic 
creation. Furtunately Eugene Burnand 
has commanded a rich store of vivid 
memories of what he has seen and studied 
and profoundly grasped in earlier days, 
without which, it does not need be empha- 


was the first to reach it; but it was John 
himself who first ‘‘saw and believed.” 


endowed with a soul 
quality, are breathing 
creatures, each with 
its peculiar physiog- 
nomy, its individuality, its part to play, 
and its distinction of being in the choir 
celestial. ‘“‘By the harmony of air and 
light with that of which they are the 
illumination I will make you hear the trees 
moaning beneath the north wind and the 
birds calling to their young.”’ As Diirer 
worked seven times on the same scenes of 
the Passion, until he found the simplest 
and most speaking expression, so Burnand 
has treated the same motives ten and 
twenty times. He begins an interrupted 
picture again and again, and—witness his 
“Peter and John Running to the Tomb,” 
or his ‘‘Man of Sorrows,’’—adds something 
to it to heighten the expression, as Leon- 
ardo died with the consciousness that some- 
thing was lacking in his ‘‘ Joconde.”’ 


194 


he at 


THE Two DISCIPLES RUNNING 





EUGENE BURNAND (1850- Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
John XX, 4 


VELASQUEZ 


AW JESPITE the extravagant asser- 
4 tion of Ruskin that ‘“‘every- 
thing Velasquez does may be 
regarded as absolutely right,” 
until the year 1776 the work 
of Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velasquez, 
who was born in Seville in 1599 and died 
in Madrid sixty-one years later, was 
scarcely known outside of Spain. In 1776 
Raphael Mengs wrote: ‘‘How this painter, 





ducats, to which was added a special re- 
muneration, Pacheco states, for each work 
produced. 

Of the first importance in his career was 
the visit of Rubens, in 1628, on an em- 
bassage to the Spanish court. A lesser 
man than Velasquez might have quaked 
with apprehension when he found the 
King sitting to Rubens for a portrait in 
his own studio. But not he who had 


greater than Raphael 
or Titian, truer far 
than Rubens or Van 
Dyck, should have 
been lost to view is 
more than I can com- 
prehend. I cannot 
find words to describe 
the splendor of his 
arts. But, in. the 
words of Elbert Hun- 
bard, “the world 
wagged on in _ its 
sleepy way, and it 
was not until 1828 
that an Englishman, 
Sir David Wilkie, be- 
gan quietly to buy 
up all the stray pic- 
tures by Velasquez 
that he could find in 
Spain. He sent them 
to England, and the 


THs “Supper at Emmaus,” by Velas- 

quez, serves excellently to illustrate 
his idealizing power exercised through his 
intense perception of truth and beauty of 
light. Here the Spanish master was an 
innovator—a pioneer painter of light and 
air, the first painter of aspects. The 
source of the light is behind the Christ, 
from whom it seems to glance onto the 
table-cloth and the outstretched hand and 
face of the Apostle. The Christ in this 
picture will bear comparison with the 
Christ painted by Rembrandt in his picture 
of the same subject. An abstract resigna- 
tion is finely expressed in the face, as 
though the Master were present in the 
spirit and not in the flesh, and as though 
he were hardly aware of what his ani- 
mated companions are saying. 


painted the King a 
score of times; no 
one else had been 
allowedto paint Philip 
IV and Velasquez 
was curious to see 
how the picture would ' 
come out. In fact, 
the two painters be- 
came fast friends, and 
it was Rubens who 
persuaded Velasquez 
to go to Italy in 
1630, a visit which 
permitted a_ close 
study of Titian and 
Tintoretto and 
brought about such a 
change and develop- 
ment in the style of 
Velasquez that he 
definitely became ‘‘a 
painter only of vis- 


world one day awoke 

to the fact that Velasquez was one of the 
greatest artists of all time.’’ Of the two 
hundred and seventy-four pictures that he 
painted, a majority are now believed to 
be in America. 

Velasquez passed his boyhood inSeville, also 
the birth and death place of Murillo. At 
thirteen he began studying under Fran- 
cesco Pacheco, with whom he remained 
five years before becoming his son-in-law, 
an event which the elder master thus 
naively records: ‘After five years of edu- 
cation and training, I married him to my 
daughter, induced by his youth, integrity 
and good qualities, and the prospects of 
his great natural genius.” 

Justifying the prophecy, at the age of 
twenty-three Velasquez was formally in- 
stalled in Madrid as one of the specially 
privileged painters to Philip IV, with a 
studio in the palace, a residence in the 
city, and a monthly stipend of twenty 


196 


ible, tangible beings 
on earth, not of vague and heavenly hosts.”’ 
Velasquez acquired, in addition to his 
place as Spanish court painter, several 
sinecures over a long period of years. As 
palace marshal, it fell to him to prearrange 
the royal journey to the Pyrenees in 1660, 
on the occasion of the betrothal of the 
Infanta Maria Theresa to Louis XIV of 
France. When the royal caravan, after a 
month on the road, reached San Sebastian, 
the place chosen for the meeting of the 
French and Spanish courts, it was his office 
to inspect the ephemeral palace erected on 
the Island of Pheasants as a conference 
house for the joint accommodation of the 
two sovereigns, and to superintend its 
decoration. Returning home, Velasquez 
was greeted with joy by his family and 
friends; for a report of his death, which 
was but a presage of the end, then close at 
hand, had preceded him. Shortly after- 
wards he was stricken with a fatal fever. 


CHRIST AND THE PILGRIMS OF EMMAUS 





VELASQUEZ (1599-1660) Metropolitan Museum of Art 
Luke XXIV, 30 New York City 


CIMA DA CONEGLIANO 


N the little Italian town of 
Conegliano, on the border of 
the Voralpen, there is. still 
standing a modest house marked 

a with a tablet stating simply that 
it was the birthplace of one Cima, in 
1459 or 1460, and that he was christened 
Giambattista. The name of Cima is re- 
miniscent of the occupation of his fore- 
fathers, who were cloth-shearers, and the 





carried on in his Madonnas the tradition 
of Giovanni Bellini, whose pupil he is be- 
lieved to have been. Cima is thought to 
have painted his most celebrated picture, 
“The Incredulity of St. Thomas,’’ some- 
time between 1504 and 1506, and it be- 
longs to the transition stage of his work. 
Rivalling this picture in popular estima- 
tion is his ‘‘Madonna and Saints,” now 
in the Church of Santa Maria dell’ Orto, 


family line, although 
obscure enough, can 
be traced back in 
Conegliano into the 
early part of the 
fourteenth century. 

Cima himself appears 
to have had no dis- 
position to ornament 
the cloth-shearing in- 
dustry, but biograph- 
ical material concern- 
ing his early life, and 
his later career like- 
wise, iS sO meager 
that it is not known 
just how or when he 


OF the existing pictures of “The In- 

credulity of St. Thomas,’’ the three 
most meritorious as well as celebrated are 
by Cima da Conegliano and by Duccio. 
Of the two accredited to Cima, one con- 
sisting of twelve figures, was painted in 
1504, and the other, which we reproduce, 
is believed to have been painted subse- 
quently. It is a composition of three 
figures—those of Jesus, of St. Thomas and, 
anachronistically, of Archbishop Magnus, 
who was a contemporary of the painter 
and may have posed for him. It is painted 
on a wood panel, the upper part rounded, 


Venice. Ruskin has 
praised and copied 
the harmonious back- 
ground of this paint- 
ing, observing that 
in this early Renais- 
sance period ‘‘the arts 
of Greece and some of’ 
its religion return and 
join themselves to 
Christianity; not tak- 
ing away its sincerity 
and earnestness, but 
making it poetical in- 
stead of practical. In 
the following period, 
even this poetic 


began painting. It is 
known that he was 
employed in the 
neighboring town of 
Vicenza, in 1488, and 
the presumption is 
that, being twenty-eight or twenty-nine 
years of age at the time, he was a painter. 
In 1492 he went to Venice and there re- 
mained until 1516, when he is thought to 
have retired to Conegliano, where he died 
in 1517 or 1518. 

Other than the fact that he was twice 
married, and had eight children, little or 
nothing is known of the personal life of 
Cima. He lived in Venice at a time when 
it is not easy to overestimate the abun- 
dant excellence of portraiture. Just as the 
wealth and power of her merchant princes 
were the source of the success of the State, 
so the luxury they were able to afford 
drew to the island city of the Adriatic all 
the artistic genius of the neighboring main- 
land. Of the multitude of artists who 
during this century were adorning the 
public buildings and private palaces of 
Venice, only a few of the most celebrated 
can be enumerated. 

Cima, coming from Conegliano to Venice, 


and the figures are life size. 
light and shade, Cima, a Venetian, ex- 
presses in this picture what a Florentine 
painter would have said in form and action. 


198 


Christianity ex- 
pressed by the arts 
became devoted to 
the pursuit of pleas- 
ure, and in that they 
; persist, except where 
they are saved by a healthy naturalism or 
domesticity. But in this period was fifty 
years of perfect work—the time of the 
masters, including Luini, Leonardo, Gio- 
vanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Mantegna, Ver- 
rocchio, Cima da Conegliano, Perugino and 
—in date, though only in his earlier life 
belonging to the school—Raphael.”’ 

Of all the pupils of Giovanni Bellini, among 
whom was Carpaccio, Cima is considered 
to be the most significant figure. Perhaps 
he was too late in coming to Venice, or 
was not quick of learning, but at any rate 
his eye was very slow to see things painter- 
fashion. Nevertheless he developed a dis- 
tinct individuality. Thanks to his innate 
architectonic sense, Cima, alone among the 
Venetian painters of the transition period, 
discovered linear continuity in composi- 
tion, that is, the balance of light and the 
flow of action. He also was the first of the 
Venetians to recognize the effect of fig- 
ures outlined against a background of sky. 


With color, 


eT! ee 


THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS 





CIMA DA CONEGLIANO (1459?-1517?) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
John XX, 24 Academy, Venice 


JOHN LA FARGE 


err=7F},0HN LA FARGE is regarded 

by many critics and connois- 

seurs as the greatest religious 
Ke painter America has ever pro- 

duced. He was born in New 
York City in 1835 and died there in 1910. 
Few painters, even in the great Renais- 
sance period, have been so versatile. His 
scope ranges from flowers to religious sub- 
jects, portraits and landscapes; he worked 
in oil, in water-color, 
on wood and on glass. 
His color is varied, 
sometimes expressed 
with a charm that 
suggests the opales- 


A FARGE’S “Ascension” is declared 
by a critic of such authority as Royal 
Cortissoz to be “the greatest religious 
painting of our own time’... “and a 


developed. Comparing the me hods of 
La Farge with those of the old masters, 
Cortissoz observes that “‘a great religious 
painting grew under his hands precisely as 
it grew under the hands of a Titian or 
even a Leonardo. When we talk about 
the man of action as though he had 
traits decisively separating him from the 
artist, we should remember that the artist 
is a man of action in that at least while a 
dreamer he is also a 
doer, a maker. La 
Farge, slowly fashion- 
ing his picture so that 
it might become an 
organic part of an 


cent quality of a  verttably sublime work of art.” Itis one architectural en- 
pearl; then again it of the largest canvases in America, and semble, sends me 
is strong, with sharp 1s of golden-glowing composition. Stand- back with heightened 
and striking con- ing in a group are the twelve apostles, sympathy to thegreat 
trasts. His drawing gqbove the heads of whom the Son of Man company of his au- 


is always good. His 
greatest contribution 


is pendant in the air. 


gust predecessors. I 


Around Him is 
seem only to appre- 


to art, besides his 
mural paintings, is 
his successful experi- 
ments inglass cutting, 


almost a complete circle of angels in atti- 
tudes of praise and adoration. To the right 
of the apostles stands the Virgin Mary 
gazing, with hands uplifted, toward the 


hend a more vital 
character in the beau- 


in addition to paint- 
ing and designing. 
La Farge, in his letters written about his 
great painting of the ‘‘Ascension”’, de- 
scribes his methods of work, how he 
studied the matter of proportioning his 
figures to the given space, how he pondered 
over the naturalistic appearance which he 
wished to establish in the landscape, and 
so on. In the effort to make some of his 
figures look at their ease floating in the 
air, ‘‘I studied what I could,” he writes, 
“of the people who are swung in ropes and 
other arrangements across theatres and 
circuses.” The landscape _ especially 
troubled him, and on this point he re- 
cords that he got his mountain effects for 
this picture one day in Japan. ‘Before 
me was a space of mountain and cloud 
and flat land that seemed to me to be 
what I needed. I gave up my other work 
and made thereupon a rapid but very care- 
ful study, so complete that the big picture 
is only a part of the amount of work put 
into the study of that afternoon.” 

The appeal of this picture is that of 
religious painting of the highest order, yet 
one can see from the foregoing out of what 
human perplexities and expedients it was 


Saviour miraculously suspended overhead. 


200 


ty of their works 
when I trace behind 
their unquestioned 


mysticism endless 
traits of a more mundane and personal 
origin.’’ The versatility of John La Farge 
is curiously reminiscent of the great mural 
painters of old, who were also portrait- 
painters, as much at home with a secular as 
with a sacred subject—in other words, 
simply great masters of a craft. 
At one time La Farge was undecided 
whether to follow law or art asa life-work. 
It was William M. Hunt who influenced 
him to become a painter by helping him 
to appreciate color, as well as to overcome 
discouraging technical difficulties. His 
growth as an artist was healthy rather 
than spectacular. At thirty-four he was a 
member of the National Academy. In 
1876 he was engaged for the whole mural 
decoration of Trinity Church, Boston; 
and in 1878, he, with the assistance of 
Saint Gaudens, built the King sepulchral 
monument at Newport, R. I. In 1886 he 
visited Japan and the South Sea Islands, 
making many water-color sketches of na- 
tive life and scenes. Returning to America, 
he painted, during the following year, his 
great altar-piece for the Church of the 
Ascension in New York. 





THE ASCENSION 


f 
f 
y 
£ 


Ree ee) 





New York City 


Church of the Ascension 


5-1910) 


JOHN LA FARGE (183 


Luke XXIV, 51 


ALBRECHT DURER 
= LBRECHT DURER, whose 


! 


work best typifies the early 
art of Germany, was the son 
<) a 5 of a Hungarian goldsmith 
<2 who settled in Nuremberg, 
married and had eighteen children, of 
whom Albrecht, born in 1471, was the 
third. His artistic bent was early mani- 
fested, and seems to have been heartily en- 
couraged by both his father and mother. 





they show me much honor and friendship. 
On the other hand, there are also among 
them some of the most false, lying, thiev- 
ish rascals: I would never have believed 
that such were living in the world. If 
one did not know them one would think 
them the best the earth could show. I 
have many good friends who warn me not 
to eat and drink with their painters, many 
of whom are my enemies. They copy my 


His period of appren- 
ticeship was followed 
by four years of travel 
and study, mainly in 
Germany. Shortly af- 
ter his return home 
he briefly records, in 
1494, that he was 
married to a Mistress 
Agnes Frey, whose 
marriage settlement 
was 200 florins. In 
his records and jour- 
nals thereafter, Diirer 
only occasionally al- 
ludes to his wife, who 
seems to have been 
a good business wom- 
an; but it is tradi- 
tional that his mar- 
ried life was far from 
being happy. With 
his marriage and set- 
tlement, however, 
Diirer’s life as a mas- 


HE Four Apostles,’ which Durer 

painted two years before he died, is 
generally conceded to be his greatest 
achievement. St. John, contemplating an 
open Bible in the foreground of one panel, 
expresses the profound meditation of a soul 
absorbed in intellectual research. Behind 
him St. Peter leans over the Book. An 
aged man, full of contemplative repose, 
Peter expresses the phlegmatic tempera- 
ment. The other panel is more objec- 
tive in illustrating the relation of faith to 
external life. St. Mark, in the background, 
looks boldly about him, ready to exhort 
his hearers to embrace the faith. In the 
foreground, St. Paul, with sword and 
Bible, is a challenge incarnate, ready to 
defend the Holy Word and to punish 
blasphemers. His is the choleric tem- 
perament. The coloring of these great 
panels is warm, natural, vigorous. 


work in the churches 
and wherever they 
can find it; and then 
revile it and say the 
style is not antique 
and so not good. The 
nobles wish me well, 
but few of the paint- 
ers.”’ Nevertheless, 
he concludes, ‘‘Here, 
I am a gentleman, at 
home only a hanger- 
on.’’ 

Diirer was offered a 
sinecure by the Vene- 
tian Senate, carrying 
a salary of 200 ducats 
a year, if he would 
remain in Venice; but 
he declined the offer 
and in 1507 returned 
to Nuremberg to exe- 
cute various works. 
The year of 1520 he 
spent with his family 


ter-painter began; 

and for the next eleven years he main- 
tained a studio in his native city. 

In 1505 Nuremberg was visited by a pes- 
tilence, and Diirer found occasion and 
means to go to Venice. Vasari states that 
he went to Italy primarily to protect his 
rights against a Venetian engraver who 
was copying his plates and monogram; 
for “his wonderful engravings had already 
penetrated to Italy, and had spread his 
fame beyond the Alps until it had come 
to the ears of Raphael, among others, who, 
a few years later exchanged drawings with 
him.”’ 

If Diirer did not arrive in Venice a fa- 
mous man, he was soon by way of being a 
celebrity. Writing to a friend in Nurem- 
berg, he says: ‘‘There are so many good 
fellows among the Italians who seek my 
company more and more every day ... and 


travellingin the Neth- 
erlands, selling his prints to defray ex- 
penses. Financially, the trip was a failure. 
That Diirer himself regarded ‘“‘The Four 
Apostles’’ ashismagnum opus isevidenced 
by a letter he-wrote to the town council 
of Nuremberg, praying it to receive the 
panels which he had “painted with greater 
care than any other,’”’ and on which he 
inscribed: ‘‘All worldly rulers in these times 
of danger should beware that they receive 
not false teaching for the Word of God. 
For God will have nothing added to His 
Word nor yet taken away. Hear, there- 
fore, these four excellent men, Peter, John, 
Paul and Mark, their warning.” 
The council accepted the gift and paid the 
artist; but a century later ‘“‘the ungrateful 
city sold this memorial of her most illus- 
trious son to Maximilian of Bavaria, and 
filled the place of the panels with copies.” 


To er 


FOUR APOSTLES 





a “2 Pas Mi AS ERC IAG ASR SA Sale SE III HOE 5p 


ALBRECHT DURER (1471-1528) 


Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Munich Gallery 


LE SUEUR 


Ww, SZAITHER than the fact that he 
married, had six children and 
painted more than two hun- 
PN dred pictures, the life of the 
French artist, Eustache Le 
Sueur, was singularly uneventful. His 
seventeenth-century biography appears in 
sharp contrast to the biographies of iis 
artist contemporaries. It can be summa- 
rized in a sentence: Le Sueur was born 
1617, lived and died 
in Paris. If he re- 
ceived commissions 
from the king or had 
noble and powerful 
patrons, there is no 
record of his having 
been on familiar terms 
with them. He was 
untouched by favor 
or by disgrace such 
as marked the careers 
of so many artists of 
the time, notably 
Charles Le Brun and 
Pierre Mignard. 
His father was a 
wood-turner, or car- 
penter, and entered his son at the studio 
of one Master Simon Vouet, when the lad 
was about fifteen years old. This Vouet 
had recently returned from Italy with an 
Italian bride and with a profound ven- 
eration for the masters of the Italian 
Renaissance whose fame, at that time, was 
just beginning to reach into France. As 
fellow students, under Vouet, Le Sueur had 
Le Brun and Mignard. Sharing, as he 
did with his early preceptor, an admiration 
for Italian art, Le Sueur was an exception 
to the painters of his age in that he never 
went to Italy. This most likely was due 
to the fact that he could not easily have 
afforded the expense of such a trip. But 
his works betray evidence of his careful 
study of Raphael in particular, probably 
from engravings or from copies cf that 
great master, made by French painters 
and exhibited in Paris. At twenty-eight 
Le Sueur married the daughter of a 
grocer, who bore him six children of bap- 
tismal record. 
At the creation of the French Academy of 
Painting and Sculpture, in 1648, Le Sueur 
was one of the founders, and it was about 
that time that he came into royal favor and 


lected master. 


E SUEUR was commissioned in 1649, 

by the Goldsmiths’ Guild of Paris, to 
paint ‘St. Paul Preaching at Ephesus.” 
It is one of the best known, if not most 
enterprising, compositions of this neg- 
It is admirable in detail. 
Note the negro executioner in the fore- 
ground, a very modern touch and yet 
striking an exotic note that is unusual in 
Le Sueur, and the animalesque pose, on 
hands and knees, of the creature blowing 
the fire that is to consume the pagan books. 
St. Paul is a no less convincing figure than 
evidently is the sermon he is preaching. 


204 


was formally appointed painter to the King. 
The fact that Le Sueur died at thirty-eight 
leaving more than two hundred canvases, 
testifies to his industry. The cause of his 
death seems to have been a particularly 
virulent fever that wasted him to the 
shadow of his never robust self. There are 
many legends of his friendship with Pous- 
sin, and of his enmity with Le Brun, but 
they are not substantiated by recorded fact. 
Le Sueur was fortu- 
nate in having the 
patronage of the 
Catholic hierarchy of 
Paris, particularly of 
the prelates of Notre 
Dame. It was for 
that great Cathedral 
that he painted his 
“St. Paul Preaching 
at Ephesus.”’ His 
works are to be seen 
in many of the older 
churches and religious 
institutions of Paris. 
Physically delicate 
himself, it is not sur- 
prising that the art 
of Le Sueur is essentially delicate. The 
term applies to the painter both as re- 
gards his technique and his moral point of 
view. His drawing is delicate, as is his color. 
Neither Le Sueur nor his contemporaries, 
Mignard and Le Brun, achieved the dis- 
tinction of originating a national French 
style of painting; and the kind of painting 
that we look upon today as being. essen- 
tially and characteristically French only 
came into existence when, in 1702, one 
Antoine Watteau left his home in Valen- 
ciennes for a studio in Paris. .It was this 
frail successor to Le Sueur who founded the 
strongest of all the modern schools of 
painting. According to Gabriel Rouchés, 
“During more than two hundred years the 
reputation of Eustache Le Sueur was as 
that of Gibraltar, and then it dwindled 
and disappeared in a strange eclipse. He 
was able to hold the sympathy and inter- 
est of such eminent critics as Theophile 
Gautier, Viardot and Arséne Houssaye. 
But theirs was the last breath of enthusi- 
asm that kept his spark of celebrity alive. 
A decade later the name of this seventeenth- 
century master was lost in the roar of 
Paris. Le Sueur was simply forgotten.” 


ST. PAUL PREACHING AT EPHESUS 


Hagia gt 





EUSTACHE LE SUEUR (1617-1655) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Acts XVII, 15 5 Louvre, Paris 


\ 


CARAVAGGIO 


HAT is known as the Nea- 
politan School of Painters 
originated with Michelan- 
4» gelo Amerigi, called Cara- 
a vaggio after his birthplace 
near Milan where he first saw the light in 
1569. Undaunted by the great achieve- 
ments of the Italian masters who immedi- 
ately preceded him, Caravaggio sought to 
form an independent style of his own, in- 


4 





generation—Velasquez and Rembrandt.” 
In his own time, Caravaggio’s experiments 
in interior and artificial lighting were 
widely imitated, and again are to be seen 
in modern impressionistic painting. His 
rejection of noble form—of the idealistic 
method—in favor of what one sees with 
the naked eye, and of decorative color in 
favor of natural, was a sharp and direct 
challenge of the Renaissance style, and 


stead of slavishly cop- 
ying Titian, Tinto- 
retto, Raphael and 
Michel Angelo. As Sir 
William Orpen points 
out, Caravaggio saw 
the error of his con- 
temporaries and “‘per- 
ceiving that art based 
-on art leads to de- 
cadence, he gave his 
whole attention to na- 
ture and so became a 
pioneer of realism.” 
‘His real fight,” ob- 
serves Professor 
Mather, ‘was with 
the nobility of Ra- 


IS “Death of the Virgin” is one of the 

two undisputed masterpieces of Cara- 
vaggio. Init the grief of Martha and the 
other mourners is deeply realistic and 
moving. In painting this picture Cara- 
vaggio had carefully studied the impres- 
sionistic manner of Titian and was begin- 
ning to adopt a harsh and resolute chia- 
roscuro with the light restricted and the 
canvas mostly black. The expression on 
the face of the dead woman is eloquent of 
her release from suffering. Caravaggio 
was fortunate in his model for Mary, as 
contrasted to the feeble, girlish, common- 
place and even vulgar women who appear 


outside of Italy where 
the noble tradition 
was only incipient, 
Caravaggio did much 
to arrest its influence. 
Mather goes on to 
say, ‘““From the point 
of view of modern art 
there are few more 
important figures 
than that of Cara- 
vaggio. From the 
point of view of art 
broadly he has his 
serious limitations. 
Most damaging is his 
waiver of civilization, 
he looks at low life 


phael. His saints are 
taken from the streets 
and often from the 
gutters. He loves character above all, and 
wants it proletarian. Within his chosen 
limitations he admittedly is a powerful 
and sincere artist.” 

Both at Rome and Naples this sturdy, 
swaggering Caravaggio appears to have had 
an immense success. His pictures—espe- 
cially portraits—are said to have com- 
manded better prices than were obtained 
by any of his contemporaries. He boasted 
himself the greatest painter of all time, 
and was often believed. From his swarthy 
tones his school of disciples took the name 
of Tenebrists. The novelty in his treat- 
ment chiefly consisted of the use Caravag- 
gio made of light and shade (technically 
known as chiaroscuro) to render his pic- 
tures more dramatically intense. He ex- 
aggerated his shadows which, to quote 
Orpen, ‘‘were far too black to be scrupu- 
lously faithful to nature, but by the em- 
phasis he thus gave to his lights he pro- 
duced original and arresting effects which 
undoubtedly had a powerful influence on 
the two greatest painters of the next 


to have been usually selected as models 
in the Post-Renaissance period. 


206 


not with the eyes of 
a detached artist but 
with those ofa ruffian. 
Nor did he live up to his own formula. 
His contemporaries regarded the Cara- 
vaggio method as ‘too natural’. A modern 
realist would make the far more radical 
criticism that Caravaggio is not natural 
enough. He really makes no close study 
of the subtleties of natural appearance or 
of the actual refinements of illumination. 
Logically he should have gone forward 
with Ribera and Velasquez to a real in- 
vestigation of appearances. But his logic 
was only that of scorn, and it would doubt- 
less have somewhat compensated him for a 
sordid and premature end, could he have 
foreseen that his biographers would credit 
him with the ruin of Italian painting.” 
Caravaggio’s love for the low life, sym- 
bolized in his famous picture ‘‘The Card 
Players,’’ led him to commit a murder in 
a gambling quarrel at Rome. To avoid 
paying the penalty of this act he escaped 
to Naples and then to Malta where his 
fierce temper again landed him in prison. 
Later, being pardoned, he set forth for 
Rome, where he died of a fever. 


aa 


THE DEATH OF THE VIRGIN 





CARAVAGGIO (1569-1609) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun glee 
ouvre, Paris 


DIT LAN 


XCEPT in his portrait work, 
Titian is said to have painted 
4 mostly from his own imagina- 
tion, and only used female 
models in case of necessity. 
Indeed, his types of women have little in 
common with the small, brown, black-eyed 
maidens who usually are associated with 
Venice. They are nearer akin to the fair- 
haired Lombard women or the Dianas and 
Junos of his Alpine 
boyhood home in Ca- 
dore. What we call I 
the idealism of Titian 
is not the result of 
aesthetic reflection, 
but, as Muther has 
pointed out, “‘the nat- 
ural point of view of 
a man who wandered 
upon the heights of 
life, never knew trivial 
care, nor even expe- 
rienced sickness; and 
therefore saw the 
world healthy and 
beautiful, in gleaming 
and majestic splen- 
dor.”’ 

Overwhelmed with commissions, liberally 
compensated as a rule, pensioned. and 
worthily enjoying his good fortune, this 
great painter, although not very learned, 
enjoyed his high place in Venetian society, 
having ‘‘natural intelligence, while famili- 
arity with courts taught him every proper 
term of the knight and of the man of the 
world.’’ His letters to princes and to 
ministers concerning his pictures are those 
of a gentleman addressing gentlemen. No 
rigorist was he, but a boon companion, 
eating and drinking daintily and heartily, 
appreciative of music, of luxury, and par- 
ticularly enjoying the society of gentle- 
women. . . 

As Taine observes, ‘“‘His painting is healthy, 
exempt from morbidity and painful com- 
plications. He painted incessantly, with- 
out turmoil of the brain and without pas- 
sion during his whole life of nearly a 
hundred years. He commenced while still 
a child, and his hand was naturally obedient 
to his mind. He declared that his talent 
was a special grace from heaven; that it 
was necessary to be thus endowed in order 
to be a good painter, for otherwise, ‘one 





behind her. 


N this ‘“‘Assumption,” says Grant Allen, 
“the scheme of color is so arranged 
that the spectator’s eye 
drawn toward the ecstatic figure of the 
ascending Madonna in the center. She 
mounts as if of herself, impelled by inner 
impulse, but on clouds of glory borne by 
childish angels, the light on whose forms 
is admirably concentrated. But the spec- 
tator sees chiefly the rapt shape of Our 
Lady herself and the brilliant golden haze 
She holds out her arms to 
the Lord in heaven. Above, the Almighty 
Father descends to receive her, floating 
in a vague halo of luminous cherubim.” 


cannot give birth to any but imperfect 
works’; that in this art ‘genius must not 
be agitated.’ Around him beauty, taste, 
education, the talents of others, reflect 
back on him, as from a mirror, the bright- 
ness of his own genius.”’ ; 
Titian aimed at nothing beyond his art, as 
did Leonardo da Vinci and Michel Angelo. 
for example. Daily he designed some- 
thing in chalk or in charcoal. A supper in 
congenial company — 
made the day com- 
plete. He seems 
never to have been 
in a hurry, though 
always busy. He kept 
his paintings by him 
a long time in order to 
study them carefully 
and improve them in 
any and every con- 
ceivable way. His 
pictures do not scale 
off; he used simple 
colors, “‘especially red 
and blue, which never 
deform figures.” Taine | 
concludes, “It would 
be necessary to revert 
to the brightest days of pagan antiquity to 
find a genius so in accord with his surround- 
ings, an expansion of faculties so natural 
and so harmonious, a similar concord of 
man with himself and with the outer world.” 
If, comments Claude Phillips, Titian does 
not soar as high as Leonardo or Michel 
Angelo, and lacks the ‘‘divine suavity’’ 
that makes Raphael unique in art, “‘he is 
wider in scope, more glowing with the life- 
blood of humanity, more the poet-painter 
of the world and of its. fairest creatures 
than any of these. . . . The sacred art of 
no other painter of the full Sixteenth 
Century—not even that of Raphael himself 
—has to an equal degree influenced other ~ 
painters and molded the style of the world.”’ 
We are told that Titian prepared his pic- 
tures with a solid stratum of pigment, 
which served as a bed upon which to return 
frequently. Some of these preparations 
were made with a brush heavily laden with 
color, the half tints struck in with pure 
red earth, the lights with white, relieved 
by touches of the same brush dipped into 
red, black and yellow. Thus he would give 
the promise of a figure in four strokes. 


is irresistibly 


208 


THE ASSUMPTION 





TITIAN (1477-1576) Courtesy Maison Ad, Braun & Cie. 
The Academy, Venice 


BOTTICELLI 


ANDRO BOTTICELLI, or, 
m to use his original name, 
8 Alessandro di Mariano Fili- 
pepi, was born at Florence, 
Italy, in the year 1447. He 
was revered as a master by both Leonardo 
da Vinci and Michel Angelo, the latter 
having been one of his pupils. His father 
was a Florentine citizen in comfortable 
circumstances; and Vasari relates that 
Sandro was educated 
I 





with great care, and 
“instructed in all such 
things as children are 
usually taught before 
they choose a call- 
ing.’”’ But the boy 
evidenced a violent 
antipathy to learning. 
He was. constantly 
discontented and ab- 
solutely refused to 
give his attention to 
reading, writing and 
accounts, says Vasari; 
until at last his father, 
despairing of making 
a scholar of him, 
placed him in the 
shop of a goldsmith 
named Botticello, an old friend and an 
excellent workman, who taught the boy 
his trade. 

Sandro was destined for higher things; 
but he took from his first master not only 
the name by which he has become famous, 
but the precision of line and patient atten- 
tion to detail which marked all his work 
in after-life. From him, too, he learned 
the use of gold which he turned to such 
good account in his painting and to such 
bad account in his life. For Botticelli 
was prematurely decrepit at sixty-three, 
“forced to go on crutches, unable to stand 
upright, and dependent for his bread upon 
the charity of others.”’ 

Outgrowing the goldsmithy, young Sand- 
ro was seized with so passionate a desire 
to become a painter that his indulgent 
father placed him with the Carmelite 
monk, Fra Filippo Lippi, then one of 
the first masters in Florence. Sandro 
had found his vocation, and soon attained 
a degree of perfection that no one had 
expected from the wayward, eccentric 
boy. At twenty-two he was considered 


N this picture the Madonna, clad in a 
dark-green, gold-embroidered robe, and 
holding the Child in her arms, is sur- 
rounded by angels, two of whom hold the 
crown over her head, while two others 
offer her the book in which she writes the 
hymn “Magnificat. 
Symonds has said: 


a? 


“It is not perhaps a 
mere fancy to imagine that the corolla 
of an open rose suggested to Botticelli the 
composition of his best-known picture, 
the circular ‘Coronation of the Virgin.’ 
This masterpiece combines and displays 
all the best qualities of its creator. 
rare distinction of beauty and mystic calm 
and resignation in the faces it is unique.” 


210 


preeminently the best painter in Florence. 
There followed some fifteen years of 
prosperity, during which period Botticelli 
enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo de 
Medici in Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV 
in Rome. Commissions came to him 
from all sides, and his productive energy 
was amazing. It was during this period 
that many of his finest works, both in 
painting and engraving, were executed. 

It is curious. to 
learn from Vasari 
that Botticelli, who 
seems so intensely in 
earnest, delighted in 
jesting, and indulged 
in wild practical jokes 
at the expense of his 
pupils and friends 
which made his work- 
shop ring with laugh- 
ter. Nevertheless, a 
vein of deep melan- 
choly runs through 
his works, and even 
when he most wished 
to be gay, he was 
sad, as it were, in 
spite of himself. “He 
loved everything that 
was fair, the shape of the opening rose, 
the changing ripples on the waves, the 
grace of the human form; and yet his 
imagination is ever beating against the 
walls of mortality, asking what lies with- 
out, and whither mortals are tending.” 
Summoned to Rome in 1480 Botticelli 
was placed in charge of the decoration of 
the newly erected Sistine Chapel, and 
executed three large frescos together with 
the earlier portraits of the series of twenty- 
eight Popes still to be seen on the upper 
part of the wall. Working with him were 
Ghirlandajo and Perugino. Their labors 
were interrupted by the death of Pope 
Sixtus, and Botticelli returned to Florence, 
to fall under the influence of the Dominican 
friar, Savonarola, whose zeal and eloquence 
were shaking the pillars of Florentine 
society. 
In his breadth and depth of culture, in 
the varied character of his subjects, in his 
greatness of aim, and the mystical bent 
of his genius, Botticelli embodies the 
diverse elements and conflicting ideas of 
the early Renaissance. 


John Addington 


For 





i 


THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN 





SANDRO BOTTICELLI (1447-1510) Courtesy Maison Ad. Braun & Cie. 
Uffizi Gallery, Florence 


ALBRECHT DURER 


= ws 


HE genius of Albrecht Diirer 
may hardly be reckoned with- 
out taking into account the 
place held by the art of en- 
graving in the late fifteenth and 
To most critics 


oy, 


early sixteenth centuries. 
it is probable that neither his paintings 
nor his drawings could by themselves have 
won for Diirer the immense popularity 
and authority he has enjoyed had he not 


DS 





mere expansion of the mind that concerns 
him; but withal he is like Luther—a Man.”’ 


His idea of art was that “it should be 


employed,”’ to use his own words, “‘in the 
service of the Church to set forth the 
sufferings of Christ and such like subjects, 
and it should also be employed to preserve 
the features of men after their death.” 

The very fact that Diirer’s contemporaries 
were so loud in praise of the extraordinary 


been a master of ‘“‘the 
most democratic of 
the arts,”’ that of en- 
graving. 

Diirer had to struggle 
hard for a_ living. 
Painting not paying, 
he devoted himself in 
the main to engrav- 
ing and etching. 
Strange to say, into 
this bread-and-butter 
work he put his best, 
with the result that 
‘he is the greatest 
engraver that ever 
lived,” though his 
painting was much 
admired by no less a 
master than Raphael. 
Camerarius, his inti- 


OF the fifteen woodcuts in a series illus- 

trating the Apocalypse by Durer, this 
one of “The Four Horsemen’’ is the most 
celebrated. It represents the vision de- 
scribed by St. John in the sixth chapter 
of Revelation. “For simple grandeur,” 
writes Professor Thausing, “this design 
has never been surpassed. What a vivid 
impression is produced upon the spectator 
of the impetuosity of the rush forward, an 
impression which Durer heightens in a 
masterly way by showing only the fore- 
fronts of the horses. The riders them- 
selves, looking angrily forward, one draw- 
ing a bow, another brandishing a sword, 
the third swinging a pair of scales behind 
him, wear the fantastic dress of the day. 
The fourth horseman is Death, with the 


technical skill with 
which he could draw 
straight lines without 
the aid of a ruler, or 
the astounding leger- 
demain with which 
he reproduced every 
single hair in a curl, 
touches cerebral 
cords, rather than 
heart-strings. Never- 
theless, we have such 
pictures as ‘“The Four 
Horsemen of the 
Apocalypse” and 
‘‘The Four Apostles,”’ 
the greatness of which 
no one denies. Here 
the mind and hand of 
the artist were in ac- 
cord. 


mate friend, writing, 
a short time after 
Diirer died, says that, 
contrary to the pre- 
vailing impression, “he was not of a 
melancholy severity nor of a repulsive 
gravity.’’ His hand was so steady and his 
touch so fine, we are told, that ‘‘one might 
have sworn that rule, square or compass 
had been employed to draw lines which he, 
in fact, drew with the brush, or very often 
with pencil or pen, unaided by artificial 
means, to the great marvel of those who 
watched him.”’ 

In Diirer the desire to live was entirely 
absorbed in the desire to think. He was 
not a man of action, and the records of 
his life are filled with accounts of what he 
saw, what he thought, and what others 
thought of him; coupled with frequent 
complaints of jealousies and lack of appre- 
ciation. ‘‘Diirer,’’ says Furst, ‘‘reflects the 
religious spirit of Protestantism. His ego 
looms large in his consciousness, and it is 
the salvation of the soul rather than the 


infernal trident. 


The downtrodden figures 
in the foreground represent “‘the fourth 
part of the earth,” which is to be slain. 


212 


The eminence of Al- 
brecht Diirer is not 
only that ofa creative 
artist, but he was, as 
Cust says, one of the great pioneers of art. 
Before him, little or nothing had been done 
north of the Alps to make art a factor in 
the popular life; and now there is probably 
no branch of the fine arts which has not 
been affected in one way or another by 
his works. He stands, as it were, on the 
watershed between the Middle Ages and 
the Renaissance, both in the advancement 
of art and in the development of the hu- 
man intellect. 

Diirer’s last years were uneventful, and he 
seems to have been a good deal of an 
invalid, but he wrote voluminously on ar- 
tistic and scientific subjects. His last and 
greatest work, ‘‘The Four Apostles,’’ was 
painted in 1526. With this Diirer seems to 
have felt that his labors as a painter 
were done, as during the next year not 
even a drawing of importance came from 
his hand. He died on the sixth of April, 1528. 


THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE 





ALBRECHT DURER (1471-1528) From the woodcut 
Revelations VI 


GALLERIES 


IN WHICH THE PICTURES ARE LOCATED 


Space does not permit a complete description of the galleries and museums rep- 
resented in this book, but as a large majority of the pictures are located in a few 
galleries, a brief history of the more important ones will well cover the ground. 

Museums of art almost invariably originated in collections made by the rich and 
powerful without at first a more definite purpose than to gratify their own pleasure 
and curiosity. The art museum as a private institution began in Italy, where in the 
fourteenth century the rulers and nobility began to make collections of coins and 
gems. Busts and statues were added later and it was not until the seventeenth cen- 
tury that pictures and drawings were also introduced. Among the oldest of such 
collections is that brought together by Cosimo de’ Medici, dating from the early 
fifteenth century and forming the basis of the present Florentine collections. The 
Vatican collections trace their origin to Pope Julius II (1503-1513). 

In passing it may be noted that boasting as it does of the Metropolitan Museum of 
Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery at Wash- 
ington, the United States is perhaps the only great nation without a national gallery. 


THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM 
OF ART, NEW YORK CITY, stands 
as a substantial denial of the charge that 
America has no appreciation of or desire 
fora knowledge ofart. Located in Central 
Park, the structure is undoubtedly the 
finest modern art museum in the world. 
Its galleries are unexcelled from the stand- 
point of beauty and effectiveness. The 
collection of paintings is naturally more 
inclusive of American art than that of 
any other school, but is quite complete 
and affords a survey of painting from the 
Italian primitives to our modern schools. 
J. Pierpont Morgan was a most generous 
patron of the Museum and the Benjamin 
Altman bequest added to the already rich 
collection of old masters. In addition to 


paintings it includes valuable collections 
in many fields of art and archaeology. 


ENTRANCE HALL, 
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM 





Its latest addition is the American Wing, 
which records by example the develop- 
ment of American furniture and domes- 
tic architecture from colonial days. 


————————————>]—__—————_- 


THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LON- 
DON, originated in the Angerstein collec- 
tion of 38 paintings, of which 29 were 
by old masters. This was bought by the 
British nation in 1824 for $280,000. In 
1832-38 a building, from designs by Wil- 
kins, was erected to house it. The gift 
in 1847 by Mr. Vernon of 157 canvases 
by English painters and the bequest by 
J. M. W. Turner are among its largest 
acquisitions. By Turner’s will nineteen 
thousand pencil and water-color sketches 
and one hundred canvases were left to 
the British nation, among them his ‘‘Car- 
thage’’ which he originally offered for five 
hundred pounds. Later he was offered 
five thousand pounds by Sir Robert Peel 
for the picture, but he had decided to keep 
it, and his dying request, which was dis- 
regarded, was that he should be buried 
in its magnificent folds. 

Sir Robert Peel’s collection of 77 paint- 
ings and 18 drawings was purchased for 
The National Gallery in 1875 for $375,900. 
In 1885, $437,500 was voted by Parliament 
for the purchase of the ‘‘Madonna degli 
Ansidei’” by Raphael and Van Dyck’s 
“‘Charles I on Horseback.”’ 

It is rich in the works of the early Italian 
masters, such as ‘‘The Raising of Lazarus” 


214 


aes 





" : yh s z od S 
a © hos 


THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON 





by Sebastiano del Piombo, the ‘‘Pieta’”’ 
of Francia and Giovanni Bellini’s ‘‘Doge 
Loredano,” the first picture secured for 
the Gallery. 

———————-}.—_——_—__—__- 


THE LOUVRE, PARIS, contains the 
rarest specimens of art owned by the 
French nation. Of the original chateau 
(the outlines of which are today marked 
on the stones of the courtyard) we know 
little, but it is certain that Philip Augustus 
in 1214 built a fortress at this point and 
that successive monarchs have altered and 
added to it, the final wing being completed 
in 1857. In the course of construction 
through the centuries each builder em- 
bodied the spirit and style of his own 
particular period in the addition so that 
the different sections form a curious combi- 
nation of different styles of architecture. 
The design of the building, as a whole, 


—< 














eee et 2 iS: 
bie : Mee 


EAST FACADE, THE LOUVRE 


however, follows a single and unified plan 
and presents a noble appearance. The 
east facade, of which a picture is shown, 
was erected for Louis XIV and has been 
called the most perfect work of archi- 
tecture in France. The Pavillon Sully, 
also illustrated, was constructed during 
the reign and in the style of the period of 
Napoleon III. 

The collection of paintings and other 
works of art made by kings of France had 
kept pace with the improvements of the 
buildings, and when in 1793 the convention 
declared the Louvre a national museum, 
there were royal collections of fitting size 
and worth to be placed in it. Francis I 
had bought ‘‘Mona Lisa’”’ from Leonardo 
da Vinci for 4,000 gold crowns and from 
that time on the royal line had been gener- 
ous patrons of art. Not to be overlooked 
are the great additions which Napoleon 





PAVILLON SULLY, THE LOUVRE 


made to the collection through his victori- 
ous campaign in Italy. -Although many 


-of these were returned to their former 


owners, much of the rich collection of 
Italian paintings comes from this source. 
One room is devoted entirely to the series 
of paintings of the life of Marie de’ Medici, 
by Rubens, originally made for the 
palace of the Luxembourg. It also has 
the finest collection of the modern French 
painters known as the Barbizon School. 
Among the world famous examples of 
sculpture which it possesses are the ‘‘Venus 
de Milo’’ and the *‘Winged Victory.” 


THE MUSEE DU LUXEMBOURG, 
PARIS, derives its name from having once 


formed part of the Palais du Luxembourg. 
The palace was first built in 1616 by 


215 


Jacques Debrosse, and was intended to 
recall to Marie de’ Medici the appearance 
of her former home, the Pitti Palace of 
Florence. 

The Musée du Luxembourg § serves 
as the great exhibition gallery of those 
modern painters whom France honors by 
the purchase of their canvases, and con- 
stitutes the most important collection of 
modern art in the world. Among foreign 
painters, America is the best represented. 
About ten years after the death of each 
artist, his works are passed upon and 
removed either to The Louvre, or to pro- 
vincial museums. 


—_$___.),_____ 


THE PITTI and the UFFIZI GAL- 
LERIES of FLORENCE are often thought 
of as a unit, not only because they are 
both the result of the rule of the Medici 
family, but because they are connected 
by a passage, nearly half a mile long. 
This corridor, built quaintly over houses 
and shops and crossing the Arno on the 
Ponte Vecchio, was designed as a means 
of escape in case of uprisings or other 
danger. 

The Uffizi was erected in 1560 after 
designs by Vasari, the biographer of the 
artists. It was intended for the offices 
of the Medici family, who were then ruling 
as Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The collec- 
tions in the Uffizi are the most important 
in Florence, as they represent most fully 
the development of the pictorial art of 
the High Renaissance. The nucleus was 
formed by the early Medici and was 
increased by each generation. The whole 
was bequeathed to the state in 1737 by 
Gian Gastone, the last of the Medici family. 








UFFIZI PALACE ACROSS THE ARNO 


The Pitti Palace was begun in 1441 by 
Luca Pitti, in proud rivalry of the power 
and magnificence of Cosimo de’ Medici. 
He chose the most famous and extravagant 
of Florentine architects, Brunelleschi, and 
gave him express directions to build a 
palace that should be able to contain in 
its courtyard the entire Riccardi Palace, 
the home of Cosimo. The windows of his 
palace, he said, must be as large as the 
doors of the Medici Palace, and it was on 
this plan that the Pitti Palace was started. 
The walls had risen to the height of only 
one story when Luca, involved in a con- 
spiracy against Cosimo’s son, fell from 
power and it remained for the younger 
branch of the Medici family a century 
later to complete it on the scale on which 
it had been started. One wing is now a 
residence of the King of Italy. 


neem (aon 


THE IMPERIAL GALLERY, VI- 
ENNA, was originally formed in the seven- 
teenth century by the union of the Prague 
collection of the Emperor Rudolph II 
(who succeeded to the Austrian throne 
in 1576), the collection of the Archduke 
Leopold William, in which were many 
Dutch and Venetian paintings, and the 
collection of the Archduke Ferdinand of 
Tyrol, which contained the ‘“‘Madonna 
of the Meadow” by Raphael and the ‘“‘St. 
Justina’”’ of Moretto (considered his finest 


work). 
—_ oh 


THE BRERA GALLERY, MILAN, is 
the Palace of Science, Letters and Arts. 


The building itself, erected by Ricchini 
for a Jesuit College in 1651, is a very 


216 


: 


Se Pee 
— 


We. ee a SR tet ee Oe ee 


oe ees 


hy 


at Ng eh vee eee a 


—_ 2. 


a" a 








COURTYARD OF THE BRERA 


beautiful example of the architecture of 
the High Renaissance. It contains a 
library of 300,000 volumes, numismatic 
and archaeological collections, besides the 
magnificent gallery of Italian paintings, 
in which is found the most notable gather- 
ing of the works of painters of the north 
Italian schools. Among these are the 
“Marriage of the Virgin’? by Raphael, 
the marvellous study of the head of Christ 
for Leonardo’s ‘‘Last Supper,’’ the ‘‘St. 
John” by Titian and a large series of fres- 
cos by Luini. 


—_———}.—____ 


ST. PETER’S AND THE VATICAN, 


ROME. The group of buildings which 
house St. Peter’s Church and the Vatican 
is recognized throughout the world as a 
symbol of the power and authority of 
the Roman Catholic Church. They con- 
tain in addition to their ecclesiastical 


treasures one of the greatest collections . 


of art in the world. 


The Vatican has been the principal 
residence of the Popes since their return 
from Avignon in 1377, and their official 
residence since the capture of Rome by 
the Piedmontese in 1870. It originated 
in the residence built by Pope Symmachus 
(498-514) adjoining the Basilica of St. 
Peter’s. 

The architect of the present church was 
Bramante, but Raphael and Michel Angelo 
both held this office at a later time and 
the dome was designed by the versatile 
Buonarotti. 

The Vatican collection of antique sculp- 
ture is world famous and is not equalled 
elsewhere. Among its treasures are the 
“Laocoén”’ and the “Apollo Belvedere’’. 
The picture gallery contains many famous 
religious paintings among which is Ra- 
phael’s famous ‘‘Transfiguration”, and 
the fresco painting in the public rooms is 
beautiful beyond description. Raphael’s 
fresco work is thought by many critics to 
excel his oil painting and it is here seen 
at its height. Fra Angelico’s frescos in 
the Vatican are a little less perfect than 
his work at Florence. 

The Sistine Chapel is the Court Chapel 
where the great papal ceremonies and 
elections are held. Its architectural fea- 
tures are the simplest, but its design pro- 
vides great wall space for decoration. The 
entire ceiling is covered with the creations 
of Michel Angelo and the four years he 
spent with this work early in his life nearly 
wrecked his health. Years later he com- 
pleted his great ‘‘Last Judgment’? which 
completely covers the wall above the 
altar. On the side walls are frescos of 
the life of Christ and the life of Moses 
painted concurrently by Perugino, 





ae 





SS 


ST. PETER’S AND THE VATICAN 


217 


Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Signorelli, Pier 
di Cosimo, Ghirlandajo and others. 

The library of the Vatican is perhaps 
the most important in the world, especially 
in regard to manuscript sources, if the 
value of its contents is considered. It 
contains approximately 50,000 manuscripts 
and 350,000 printed books. 

— —  -. ——__—__—. 

SAN MARCO, FLORENCE, formerly 
a convent of the Dominican Order, is of 
particular interest to the art student 
because it contains the best work of the 
saintly Fra Angelico. The convent was 
richly endowed by Cosimo de’ Medici, 
who had a cell reserved to which he might 





CLOISTERS OF SAN MARCO 


withdraw for spiritual refreshment. Al- 
though Fra Angelico’s panel paintings 
may be seen in northern Europe, his 
greater skill as a fresco painter can 
only be estimated at Florence, where 
he was painting for his own brethren and 
for the glorification of the Dominican 
Order. His paintings have recently been 
taken from other Florentine galleries and 
concentrated in San Marco where his 
greatest work was done. Here, later, 
worked Fra Bartolommeo and his assistant, 
Albertinelli. Here came the brilliant and 
fanatic Dominican reformer, Savonarola, 
who grew in power from the moment that 
he preached his first sermon on the Apoca- 


lypse from the pulpit of San Marco. In 


a year he was prior—in two years more 
he was, in effect, dictator of Florence. 
Another two years and Rome summoned 
him in a question of heresy, and excom- 
municated him for disobedience. Two 
years of stubborn resistance, and then he 
was dragged from the convent, tried, un- 
frocked, hanged and burned. 
of ——______ 

THE ROYAL PICTURE GALLERY, 
MADRID (Gallery of The Prado), derives 
its popular name from its situation on The 
Prado, a wide boulevard about two miles 
in length, the chief promenade of Madrid. 

The enlightened Charles III (1759-1788), 
who had previously been King of Naples, 
desired to unite in one place the treasures 
of art that till then had been contained 
in the various royal residences of Madrid 
and other cities of Spain. These paintings 
had been the property of the Spanish Royal 
House, or had come to it through gift or 
inheritance through its affiliations with 
the Royal Houses of France and Austria. 
Murillo, Velasquez, Titian and Goya are 
brilliant figures of the Gallery, but it like- 
wise contains a surprising number of can- 
vases by Dutch and Flemish painters, - 
notably many by Peter Paul Rubens. 

In all, the gallery possesses more than 
two thousand pictures, and was finally 
opened to the public, as had been the 
desire of Charles III, in the year 1828. 


*k 


THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, 
BOSTON, is one of the few great museums 
that have been founded and conducted 
entirely from private subscriptions. It 
was granted a charter in 1870 and a wing 
of the first building, in Copley Square, 
Boston, was dedicated in 1876. By 1899, 
this building had become inadequate, and 
twelve acres were purchased for the erec- 
tion of a new museum on Huntington 
Avenue. This was erected after eight 
years of planning and experiment, and 
dedicated in 1909. The Museum contains 
among other famous paintings the Stuart 
portraits of George and Martha Washington. 

The arrangement and lighting of the 
galleries make the Museum of Fine Arts 
one of the finest museum buildings in 
the world. Its Department of Prints 
is one of the finest and most excellently 
arranged in America. 


218 


ARTISTS REPRESENTED. BY SCHOOLS 


AMERICAN SCHOOL 


West, Benjamin, 1738-1820 

La Farge, John, 1835-1910 
Abbey, Edwin Austin, 1852-1911 
Low, Will H., 1853- 

Sargent, John Singer, 1856-1925 


BRITISH SCHOOL 


Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 1723-1792 

Blake, William, 1757-1827 

Brown, Ford Madox, 1821-1893 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882 
Millais, Sir John Everett, 1829-1896 
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 1833-1898 
Calderon, Philip Hermogenes, 1833-1898 
Riviére, Briton, 1840—1920 

Dicksee, Sir Francis, 1853-— 


DUTCH SCHOOL 


Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606—1669 
_ Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 1836-1912 


FLEMISH SCHOOL 


Matsys, Quinten, 1460-1530 
Rubens, Peter Paul, 1577-1640 
Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 1599-1641 
van Oost, Jacob, 1637-1713 


FRENCH SCHOOL 


Poussin, Nicolas, 1594-1665 

Le Sueur, Eustache, 1617-1655 

Le Brun, Charles, 1619-1690 

Scheffer, Ary, 1795-1858 

Decamps, Alexandre Gabriel, 1803-1860 
Flandrin, Hippolyte, 1809-1864 
Chasseriau, Theodore, 1819-1857 
Géréme, Jean Léon, 1824-1904 

Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 1824-1898 
Bouguereau, William Adolph, 1825-1905 
Moreau, Gustave, 1826-1898 

Henner, Jean-Jacques, 1829-1905 

Doré, Gustave, 1833-1883 

Bonnat, Léon, 1833-1922 

Tissot, James Joseph, 1836-1902 
Laurens, Jean Paul, 1838— 

Cazin, Jean Charles, 1841-1901 
Lhermitte, Léon Augustin, 1844-1925 


FRENCH SCHOOL 


Benjamin-Constant, J. J., 1845-1902 
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 1848-1884 
Béraud, Jean, 1849— 

Burnand, Eugene, 1850-— 

Lerolle, Henri, 1848-— 


(cont.) 


GERMAN SCHOOL 


Diirer, Albrecht, 1471-1528 
Munkacsy, Michael, 1844-1900 
Uhde, Fritz von, 1848-1911 
Prell, Hermann, 1854— 


ITALIAN SCHOOL 


Angelico, Fra, 1387-1455 
Masaccio, 1401-1428 

Bellini, Giovanni, 1428-1516 
Mantegna, Andrea, 1431-1506 
Botticelli, Sandro, 1447-1510 
Ghirlandajo, 1449-1494 

Francia, 1450-1517 

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519 
Cima da Conegliano, 1459?—1517? 
Albertinelli, Mariotto, 1474-1515 
Luini, Bernardino, 14—15— 
Michel Angelo Buonarotti, 1475-1564 
Titian, 1477-1576 

Palma Vecchio, 1480-1528 
Raphael Sanzio, 1483-1520 
Sebastiano del Piombo, 1485-1547 
Sarto, Andrea del, 1486-1531 
Correggio, 1494-1534 

Moretto da Brescia, 14982-1555? 
Bronzino, Agnolo, 1502-1572 

Il Tintoretto, 1518-1594 
Veronese, Paolo, 1528-1588 
Caravaggio, 1569-1609 

Allori, Cristofano, 1577-1621 
Domenichino, 1581—1641 

Rosa, Salvator, 1615-1673 
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 1696-1770 
Michetti, Francesco Paolo, 1851- 


SPANISH SCHOOL 


El Greco, 1545-1625 

Collantés, Francisco, 1599-1656 
Velasquez, Diego, 1599-1660 

Murillo, Bartolomé Estéban, 1617-1682 


219 


INDEX OF ARTISTS 


Abbey, Edwin Austin, 56 
Albertinelli, Mariotto, 102 
Allori, Cristofano, 84 
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 48 
Andrea del Sarto, 134 

Angelico, Fra, 98, 126 


Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 110 
Bellini, Giovanni, 136 
Benjamin-Constant, J. J., 148 
Béraud, Jean, 182 

Blake, William, 18, 78, 82 
Bonnat, Léon, 60 

Botticelli, Sandro, 210 
Bouguereau, William Adolph, 192 
Bronzino, Agnolo, 54 

Bronzino, the Younger, 84 
Brown, Ford Madox, 172 
Buonarotti, Michel Angelo, 16, 20 
Burnand, Eugéne, 194 
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 14 


Calderon, Philip Hermogenes, 66 


Lerolle, Henri, 112 

Le Sueur, Eustache, 204 
Lhermitte, Léon Augustin, 150 
Low, Will H., 152 

Luini, Bernardino, 132 


Mantegna, Andrea, 62 

Masaccio, 106 

Matsys, Quinten, 118 

Michel Angelo Buonarotti, 16, 20 
Michetti, Francesco Paolo, 144 
Millais, Sir John Everett, 130 
Moreau, Gustave, 156 

Moretto da Brescia, 162 
Munkdcsy, Michael, 176 
Murillo, Bartolomé Estéban, 92, 100, 124 


Oost, Jacob van, 70 


Palma Vecchio, 36 

Piombo, Sebastiano del, 160 
Poussin, Nicolas, 50 

Prell, Hermann, 168 


Caravaggio, Michelangelo Amerigi da, 206 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 154 


Cazin, Jean Charles, 28 
Chasseriau, Theodore, 80 
Chavannes, Pierre Puvis de, 154 
Cima da Conegliano, 198 
Collantés, Francisco, 46 

Constant, J. J. Benjamin-, 148 
Correggio, Antonio Allegri da, 114 


Decamps, Alexandre Gabriel, 38 

del Sarto, Andrea, 134 

Dicksee, Frank (Sir Francis), 74 
Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), 72 
Doré, Gustave, 24, 64 

Dyck, Sir Anthony Van, 174 

Durer, Albrecht, 202, 212 


El Greco (Domenico Theotocopuli), 184 


Flandrin, Hippolyte, 26, 164 
Francia (Raibolini), 188 


Géréme, Jean Léon, 34, 52 
Ghirlandajo, 108, 142 
Greco, El (Domenico Theotocopuli), 184 


Henner, Jean-Jacques, 190 


La Farge, John, 200 

Laurens, Jean Paul, 58 

Le Brun, Charles, 166 
Leonardo da Vinci, 4, 122, 170 
Lepage, Jules Bastien-, 110 


Raphael Sanzio, 3, 104, 116, 158 
Rembrandt van Rijn, 42, 120, 178 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 68 

Riviére, Briton, 86 

Robusti, Jacopo (Il Tintoretto), 94 
Rosa, Salvator, 22 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 96 
Rubens, Peter Paul, 128, 186 


Sargent, John Singer, 88, 90 
Sarto, Andrea del, 134 


_ Scheffer, Ary, 138 


Sebastiano del Piombo, 160 — 


Tadema, Sir Lawrence Alma-, 48 — 
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 32, 44 
Tintoretto, Il] (Jacopo Robusti), 94 
Tissot, James Joseph, 40 

Titian, 180, 208 

Tori, Angelo (Bronzino), 54 


Uhde, Fritz von, 146 


Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 174 

van Oost, Jacob, 70 

van Rijn, Rembrandt, 42, 120, 178 
Velasquez, Diego, 196 

Veronese, Paolo (Paolo Cagliari), 30, 140 
Vinci, Leonardo da, 4, 122, 170 


West, Benjamin, 78 


220 


INDEX OF PICTURES 


A Christ Child, St. Anne, The Virgin and, 123 

Abel, Cain and, 23 Cleansing of the Temple, The, 145 
Abraham and Isaac, 33 Complaint, Job’s, 83 
Adam and Eve, 19, 21 Conception, The Immaculate, 101 

The creation of, 17 : Confusion of Tongues, The, 27 
Adoration of the Magi, The, 119 Conspiracy of Judas, The, 169 
Ahasuerus, Esther Preparing to Meet, 81 Coronation of the Virgin, The, 211 
Amalek is Overcome, 53 Creation, The Days of, 15 
Among The Lowly, 151 —of Eve, 19 
Andrew, The Calling of Peter and, 143 —of Man, 17 
Anne, The Virgin, Christ Child and Saint, 123 Cross, The Descent from the, 187 
Annunciation, The, 99 Crucifixion, The, 185 


Annunciation to the Shepherds, The, 111 


Anoints the Feet of Christ, Mary Magdalen, 163 D 

Answer to the King, Daniel’s, 87 Daniel’s Answer to the King, 87 

Apocalypse, The Four Horsemen of the, 213 Daughter, Jephtha’s, 59 

Apostles John, Mark, Peter, Paul, 203 David as King, 73 

Arrival of the Shepherds, The, 113 —with the Head of Goliath, 71 

Ascension, The, 201 Days of Creation, 15 

Assumption of the Virgin, The, 209 Death of the Firstborn, The, 49 
B —of Samson, The, 65 


—of the Virgin, The, 207 
Delilah, Samson and, 63 
Deluge, The, 25 
Descent from the Cross, The, 187 
Disciples Running to the Sepulchre, The Two, 195 
Disputing with the Doctors, Christ, 133 
Doctors, Christ Disputing with the, 133 


Babel, The Tower of, 27 

Baptism of Christ, The, 137 

Baptist, John the, see John the Baptist 

Beheading of John the Baptist, 155 

Birth of St. John the Baptist, 107 

Birth of the Virgin, The, 93 

Birth of Christ, see Nativity 

Blessing Little Children, Christ, 165 E 

Blessing the Sons of J oseph, Jacob, 43 Ecce Homo, 161 

Ererren, Joseph =e By ue ae , Eden, The Expulsion from, 21 
Joseph Makes Himself Known to his, 41 Egypt, The Flight into, 127 

Burning Bush, Moses and the, 47 The Return from, 129 


Burning of Sodom, The, 31 Elijah and the Fiery Chariot, 79 


Cc ‘ Emmaus, The Supper at, 197 
Cain and Abel, 23 Entry into Jerusalem, The, 167 
Calling of Peter and Andrew, The, 143 _ Ephesus, St. Paul Preaching at, 205 
Calvary, The Road to, 183 Esther Preparing to Meet Ahasuerus, 81 
Cana, The Marriage at, 141 Eve, The Creation of, 19 
Chariot, Elijah and the Fiery, 79 Expulsion from Eden, The, 21 


Children, Christ Blessing Little, 165 


Christ, see also Jesus F 
Christ, The Baptism of, 137 Feet, Christ Washes Peter’s, 173 
—Before Pilate, 177 Feet of Christ, Mary Magdalen Anoints the, 163 
—Blessing Little Children, 165 Fiery Chariot, Elijah and the, 79 
—Disputing with the Doctors, 133 Finding of Moses, The, 45 
Mary Magdalen Anoints the Feet of, 163 Firstborn, Death of the, 49 
Mary Magdalen at the Tomb of, 191 Flight into Egypt, The, 127 
—on the Cross, 185 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The, 213 
—on the Waters, 149 , G 
—Presented to the People (Ecce Homo), 181 
The Holy Women at the Tomb of, 193 Gideon, The Stratagem of, 57 
The Temptation of, 139 Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 97 
—Washes Peter’s Feet, 173 Goliath, David with the Head of, 71 


221 


INDEX OF PICTURES 


H 


Habakkuk, The Prophet, 89 

Hagar and Ishmael, 29 

‘He that is without sin among you,’’ etc., 153 
Holofernes, Judith with the Head of, 85 

Holy Night, 115 

Holy Women at the Tomb of Christ, The, 193 
Homo, Ecce, 181 

Horeb, Moses Smites the Rock in, 51 
Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Four, 213 
Hosea, The Prophet, 91 


I 


Immaculate Conception, The, 101 
Incredulity of Thomas, The, 199 
Infant St. John with a Lamb, 125 
Infant Samuel, The, 69 

Isaac, The Sacrifice of, 33 

Isaiah, The Prophet, 89 

Ishmael, Hagar and, 29 


J 


Jacob and Rachel, The Meeting of, 37 
—Blessing the Sons of Joseph, 43 
Jephtha’s Daughter, 59 
Jeremiah, The Prophet, 89 
Jerusalem, The Entry into, 167 
Jesus, see also Christ 
Jesus, The Betrayal of, 175 
—in the Workshop of Joseph, 131 
Job’s Complaint, 83 
Joel, The Prophet, 91 
John the Baptist, 135 
The Beheading of, 155 
The Birth of, 107 
—with a Lamb, Infant, 125 
John, Saint (The Apostle), 203 
—Running to the Sepulchre, Peter and, 195 
Jonah, The Prophet, 89 
Joseph Makes Himself Known, 41 
—Sold by his Brethren, 39 
Jacob Blessing the Sons of, 43 
Joseph, Jesus in the Workshop of, 131 
judas, The Conspiracy of, 169 
Judgment of Solomon, The, 75 
Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 85 


K 
King, Daniel’s Answer to the, 87 
David as, 73 
L 


Lamb, Infant St. John with a, 125 
Last Supper, The, 171 
Law, Moses Smashes the Tables of the, 55 


Lazarus, The Raising of, 161 

Lion, Samson Kills the, 61 

Little Children, Christ Blesses the, 165 
Lowly, Among the, 151 


M 


Madonna of the Chair, 3 
Sistine, 117 
Magi, The Adoration of the, 119 
Man, The Creation of, 17 
Mark, Saint, 203 
Marriage at Cana, The, 141 
Marriage of the Virgin, The, 105 
Mary Magdalen Anoints the Feet of Christ, 163 
—at the Tomb of Christ, 191 
Mary Virgin, The Girlhood of, 97 
Meeting of Jacob and Rachel, The, 37 
Moses and the Burning Bush, 47 
The Finding of, 45 
—Breaking the Tables of the Law, 55 
—Smites the Rock in Horeb, 51 
Mount, The Sermon on the, 147 


N 
Naomi, Ruch and, 67 
Nativity, Tne, 109 
Night, Holy, 115 

Oo 


Obadiah, The Prophet, 91 


P 


Paul, Saint, 203 
—Preaching at Ephesus, 205 
Peter, Saint, 203 
—and Andrew, The Calling of, 143 
—and John Running to the Sepulchre, 195 
Peter’s Feet, Christ Washes, 173 
Pieta, 89 
Pilate, Christ before, 177 
—Washing his Hands, 179 
Presentation in the Temple, The, 121 
—of the Virgin, The, 95 


: Prophets: 


Habakkuk, 89 
Hosea, 91 
Isaiah, 89 
Jeremiah, 89 
Joel, 91 
Jonah, 89 
Obadiah, 91 
Zephaniah, 91 


Q 
Queen of Sheba, Solomon and the, 77 


222 


INDEX OF PICTURES 


R 


Rachel, The Meeting of Jacob and, 37 

Raising of Lazarus, The, 161 

Rebecca, 35 

Return from Egypt, The, 129 

Road to Calvary, The, 183 

Rock in Horeb, Moses Smites the, 51 

Running to the Sepulchre, Peter and John, 195 
Ruth and Naomi, 67 


S) 


Sacrifice of Isaac, The, 33 
Saint Anne, The Virgin, Christ Child and, 123 
Saint John (The Apostle), 203 
—and Peter Running to the Sepulchre, 195 
Saint John (The Baptist), 135 
—with a Lamb, The Infant, 125 
The Beheading of, 155 
The Birth of, 107 
Saint Mark, 203 
Saint Paul, 203 
—Preaching at Ephesus, 205 
Saint Peter, 203 
Salome, The Vision of, 157 
Samson and Delilah, 63 
The Death of, 65 
The Youth of, 61 
Samuel, The Infant, 69 
Sepulchre, Peter aud John Running to the, 195 
Sermon on the Mount, The, 147 
Sheba, Solomon and the Queen of, 77 
Shepherds, The Annunciation to the, 111 
The Arrival of the, 113 
Sistine Madonna, 117 
Sodom, The Burning of, 31 
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 77 
The Judgment of, 75 
Sons of Joseph, Jacob Blessing the, 43 
Stratagem of Gideon, The, 57 
Supper at Emmaus, The, 197 
The Last, 171 


28 


Tables of the Law, Moses Breaking the, 55 
Temple, The Cleansing of the, 145 

The Presentation in the, 121 

The Presentation of the Virgin in the, 95 
Temptation and Expulsion from Eden, The, 21 
Temptation of Christ, 139 
Thomas, The Incredulity of, 199 
Tomb, Mary Magdalen at the, 191 

Peter and John Running to the, 195 

The Holy Women at the, 193 
Tongues, The Confusion of, 27 
Tower of Babel, The, 27 
Transfiguration, The, 159 


Vv 


Virgin, Christ Child and St. Anne, The, 123 
The Assumption of the, 209 
The Birth of the, 93 
The Coronation of the, 211 
The Death of the, 207 
The Girlhood of Mary, 97 
The Marriage of the, 105 
The Presentation of the, 95 
Vision of Salome, The, 157 
Visitation, The, 103 


Ww 


Washes Peter’s Feet, Christ, 173 
Washing his Hands, Pilate, 179 
Waters, Christ on the, 149 
Women at the Tomb of Christ, The Holy, 193 
Workshop of Joseph Jesus in the, 131 
NG 


Youth of Samson, The, 61 


Z 
Zephaniah, The Prophet, 9! 


223 











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